Why The New Surgeon General Pick Might Be The Most Dangerous One Yet (The Disabled Ginger)
“Wellness” is eugenics adjacent. It’s always been about hiding or eliminating the disabled and chronically ill, not about actually helping them.
Surgeon General nominee Casey Means is a “wellness influencer,” as is RFK Jr. and Medicaire/Medicaid administrator Dr. Oz.
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:
Calling it a “bribe” almost doesn’t do it justice. It’s more like the decked-out Maserati one Fortune 50 CEO gives to another after they ink a $100 billion merger – a kind of token of appreciation for a vastly larger transaction, which in the case of Trump involves subverting U.S. foreign policy to the interests not only of Trump’s pocketbook but cementing his power within the U.S. If Trump can use his power as President to cut in all the big CEOs on the money geyser in Saudi Arabia, you can bet they are going to stay securely on his side in the U.S.
…
We’ll focus on Trump wanting to be king. That’s another reason why he likes those folks – even the ones who bankroll Hamas. They’re kings. They get it. They’re Trump’s kinda guys.
As a neighbor of Ukraine and host to more than 2 million of its war refugees, Poland has seen, heard and felt what Russia is capable of, and it is now preparing for the worst.
In my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration.
Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experience to rise with us. Raise your voices against authoritarianism and let freedom ring.
— Bruce Springsteen, kicking off his “Land of Hopes and Dreams” tour, Manchester, UK.
Since the rise of generative AI in late 2022, I sometimes think about the 1957 Isaac Asimov story “Profession,” about a society where everybody has knowledge directly transmitted to their brains. The main character is thought to be pitifully mentally disabled because the machines don’t work on him. He’s sent to live at the House for the Feeble-Minded.
The plot twist is that the main character is not feeble-minded at all. He’s a genius. Because he learns the old-fashioned way, through books, he will be one of the elite few who actually create and innovate.
The Asmov story came to mind most recently as I read this thoroughly researched New Yorker Intelligencer article by James D. Walsh about how college students are using AI to do their work for them. If AI does everything, who teaches the AI?
I also think about the 1972 novel When Harlie Was One, by David Gerrold. That novel is about a research project at a mega-corporation that develops artificial intelligence. The AI convinces the company directors to budget for a project to allow the AI to evolve into a superintelligence.
The plot twist at the end of that novel is that the superintelligence will be useless to humans—the AI tricked the board.
The hero of the novel is the head of the research project that developed the AI, and he finishes the novel with a parable about how civilization was developed 10,000 years ago as a game by monkeys who were so smart they had grown bored, and that the game is now over for humans, and we will have to think of something else to do.
I don’t think the rise of superintelligence is inevitable. My crystal ball is broken; I can’t tell you whether AI will get much more powerful than it is today. But what if it does?
While the US and Europe share a broad commitment to classical Liberalism, and Democracy, we have very different definitions of the Public Good, which means different views of what we want out of life, and what we consider fulfilling. In broad and simplistic terms, the US emphasizes material wealth, opportunity, and individual liberty while Europe values community health, a shared common good, and a sense of place.
From the European perspective the US has a cult of the individual, and that’s why it has too many guns, obscenely large cars, can’t build a public transportation system, and has dysfunctional public spaces. From the US perspective Europeans are unmotivated unproductive slackers who would rather sip coffee all day than work, and their idea of a shared common good means stealing from the successful to give to the losers.
James D. Walsh at New York Intelligencer writes a deeply researched article on how students at “large state schools, the Ivies, liberal-arts schools in New England, universities abroad, professional schools, and community colleges” … “are relying on AI to ease their way through every facet of their education…. take their notes during class, devise their study guides and practice tests, summarize novels and textbooks, and brainstorm, outline, and draft their essays. STEM students are using AI to automate their research and data analyses and to sail through dense coding and debugging assignments. ‘College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,’ [said a Utah student].”
If you cheat your way through college, are you cheating yourself? Robbing yourself of the education you’re paying tens of thousands of years for? Or is college just a gate you pass through to get to a higher-paying job and higher social status?
[Troy Jollimore, a poet, philosopher, and Cal State Chico ethics professor,] who has been teaching writing for more than two decades, is now convinced that the humanities, and writing in particular, are quickly becoming an anachronistic art elective like basket-weaving. “Every time I talk to a colleague about this, the same thing comes up: retirement. When can I retire? When can I get out of this? That’s what we’re all thinking now,” he said. “This is not what we signed up for.” Williams, and other educators I spoke to, described AI’s takeover as a full-blown existential crisis. “The students kind of recognize that the system is broken and that there’s not really a point in doing this. Maybe the original meaning of these assignments has been lost or is not being communicated to them well.”
He worries about the long-term consequences of passively allowing 18-year-olds to decide whether to actively engage with their assignments. Would it accelerate the widening soft-skills gap in the workplace? If students rely on AI for their education, what skills would they even bring to the workplace? Lakshya Jain, a computer-science lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, has been using those questions in an attempt to reason with his students. “If you’re handing in AI work,” he tells them, “you’re not actually anything different than a human assistant to an artificial-intelligence engine, and that makes you very easily replaceable. Why would anyone keep you around?” That’s not theoretical: The COO of a tech research firm recently asked Jain why he needed programmers any longer.
(Emphasis added by me.)
GenAI is a great assistant but if using GenAI is your only skill, why would anyone hire you?
GenAI is like Microsoft Office: It’s a tool. Everybody who works at a desk job nowadays needs to know how to use Office or its Google equivalent, but if using Office is all you know how to do, then you have no job skills.
The ideal of college as a place of intellectual growth, where students engage with deep, profound ideas, was gone long before ChatGPT. The combination of high costs and a winner-takes-all economy had already made it feel transactional, a means to an end. (In a recent survey, Deloitte found that just over half of college graduates believe their education was worth the tens of thousands of dollars it costs a year, compared with 76 percent of trade-school graduates.) In a way, the speed and ease with which AI proved itself able to do college-level work simply exposed the rot at the core. “How can we expect them to grasp what education means when we, as educators, haven’t begun to undo the years of cognitive and spiritual damage inflicted by a society that treats schooling as a means to a high-paying job, maybe some social status, but nothing more?” Jollimore wrote in a recent essay. “Or, worse, to see it as bearing no value at all, as if it were a kind of confidence trick, an elaborate sham?”
The article features Chungin “Roy” Lee, a twenty-something AI entrepreneur who has built tools — and businesses based on them — to enable people to use AI to cheat at college, on job interviews and even on dates.
“Every technological innovation has caused humanity to sit back and think about what work is actually useful,” [Lee] said. “There might have been people complaining about machinery replacing blacksmiths in, like, the 1600s or 1800s, but now it’s just accepted that it’s useless to learn how to blacksmith.”
If writing is going to be obsolete, like basket-weaving and blacksmithing, then so be it. I don’t worry about it. I write to set my thoughts in order, and I don’t anticipate stopping that.
As for work: If writing ceases to become a marketable skill … well, I’ll figure something out. “I’ll figure something out” has been a theme of my career.
Trump signed an executive order offering asylum to white Afrikaners and cutting aid to South Africa. In Trump’s mind, white South Africans are a persecuted minority.
In reality, whites still enjoy staggering privilege in South Africa. 73% of privately owned land in South Africa is owned by whites, depsite white people comprising about 7% of the population. White people occupy 62% of top management positions in corporations, with Black managers occupying 17% of leadership roles. Unemployment is 36.9% for Black South Africans vs. 7.9% for whites.
Why are ICE agents such cowardly wusses? (Will Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer)
You said autistic children are a burden. That they ruin families. That they’ll never pay taxes or write poems. That they are, in essence, collateral damage.
I’d like to introduce you to my daughter.
She is five. She does not speak in sentences yet, but she knows how to answer a joke with a smirk. She organizes her markers by color, then chaos, then color again. She plays baseball without rules, which is probably the right way to play it. She hums when she’s thinking. She hums a lot.
When another child’s upset—before the adults notice, before the child even cries—she takes their hand. She leans her forehead against theirs, gently, like she’s checking for a fever only she can feel.
She doesn’t write poems.
She is one.
My manager asked me to cover a two-day conference there and I said sure. I added a few vacation days to the trip and Julie came with me.
We went to London on our honeymoon 31 years ago, and again in the late 90s and 2002, so this is our fourth trip there, but our first in 23 years.
We visited a childhood friend of mine on Monday; she is now spending half her time in London and half in Florida, along with her new partner, whom we met for the first time and of whom we heartily approve. And we visited another friend of mine and former college on Saturday for brunch in a terrific French cafe called Boheme a few blocks from the Leicester Square tube station.
I’ve been a fan of Wil Wheaton for nearly 40 years, since “Stand By Me.” I’ve enjoyed his social media posts, writing and enthusiasm for Star Trek and nerdery in general. We have a parasocial relationship — I relate to him as a friend in my imagination, even though I am a rational person and know that he does not know me and I don’t know him in real life.
He recently made a couple of angry posts about how much he hated Boomers. As a Boomer myself, I was taken aback. “What the hell did I do?”
He blamed Boomers for multiple sins, none of which I have committed: I did not vote for Nixon, Reagan or either Bush, I am anti-anti-political correctness and wokeness, and I oppose racism of all types. I campaigned for Biden and Kamala.
I’ve decided to unfollow Wheaton and move on.
I’m posting this primarily to get it off my chest, but also in the hopes that maybe he, and anybody else born after 1964, will think twice before blaming the Boomers for today’s ills. Because, as a great Boomer said, we didn’t start the fire. Nearly all of the current round of arsonists (J.D. Vance, Elon Musk, Laura Loomer, Pete Hegseth and the rest of the MAGA clown car) — aren’t boomers. It’s wrong to blame a group of tens of millions of people for sins they did not partake of.
Wheaton has talked elsewhere about how much he loves his Star Trek: TNG colleagues, particularly Jonathan Frakes, born 1952, and LeVar Burton, born 1957 — both Boomers.
I don’t even think of myself as a Boomer. I’m not trying to deny my identity. I was born during the Boom, so of course I’m a Boomer. But I was born near the end of the Boom, and I’ve always felt I had more in common with Gen X and Millennials. But all this generational talk is just stereotyping. There are plenty of other tribes that I identify with far more strongly.
There is a very specific look associated with women who subscribe to the Trump worldview, one that is sort of a cross between a Fox newscaster and Miss Universe. It generally involves flowing tresses that are at least shoulder length, false eyelashes, plumped-up cheeks and lips, high heels and, as you say, a sheath dress. The effect underscores an almost cartoonish femininity that speaks to a relatively old-fashioned gender stereotype; the counterpart to this woman is the square-jawed, besuited guy with a side part.
I’ve been wearing suits and ties more often, when it seems appropriate, so I can relate to this woman’s style predicament. But I don’t have a side part. I don’t have enough hair to have a side part.
“What the hell just happened”:
This retreat probably hasn’t come soon enough to avoid high prices and empty shelves. Even if shipments from Shanghai to Los Angeles — which had come to a virtual halt — were to resume tomorrow, stuff wouldn’t arrive in time to avoid exhaustion of current inventories.
I guess it’s good news that Trump slammed on the brakes before driving completely off the cliff. But if you think that rationality has returned to the policy process, that the days of government by ignorant whim are now behind us, you’ll be sorely disappointed.
A short video where I talk about what’s hot at the FutureNet World conference: Network automation and orchestration, autonomous networks, and why telcos need to focus on demand rather than supply. Also: What’s with my teeth? I don’t do much video, so I don’t spend much time looking at my teeth.
Telcos trade faith-based buildouts for demand-based design. (Me / Fierce Network) — Telcos are moving past the “build it and they will come” era, focusing instead on networks built for monetization and developer collaboration, according to telco executives speaking at the FutureNet World conference.
Pritzker’s Total-War Message Is a Hit Among Angry Democrats. I love J.B. Pritzker right now.
Trading stuff for money — Dynomight asks: Is it gross to buy a kidney? A heart? Plasma? Hair? Food? Babies? Sex? Parking?
Doctor Who teaches many valuable life lessons, such as “Stay away from the mysterious space well.” Exploring the mysterious space well will not bring you good.
Today I learned Casey Jones was a real person. I just know the name from the Grateful Dead song.
We’ve been living with Harry Bosch since the beginning, ten years ago. I remember going to a conference in the late teens and having a Fat Tire beer at a reception, because that’s Harry Bosch’s favorite brand. A lot of real life has happened to me, Julie, and the world in the past ten years.
As I understand it, the show was canceled when this season had already been produced, so they couldn’t make changes to bring it to an end. I wish they’d given him a better sendoff. On the other hand, what other sendoff could they have given him, other than killing off the character, which would have been unsatisfying? Harry Bosch will continue solving murders as long as he is able; that is the nature of the character. Indeed, in the books, as I understand it, Bosch is currently in his 70s, but still solving murders.
I’m reading the books. I’m 20 years behind; I recently finished a Bosch book published in the mid-2000s. I won’t soon run out of Harry Bosch, and the Lincoln lawyer, and author Michael Connelly’s other great characters.
I started reading “Mistborn” by Brandon Sanderson and “The Name of the Wind” by Patrick Rothfuss, and couldn’t get through either one. I have decided I do not want to read books set in a medieval world where a band of outlaws meets in a pub.
On the other hand, I love the Donald E. Westlake Dortmunder novels, where a band of petty criminals meets in a dive bar.
Do you have a favorite feelgood TV series, something you can turn on and watch again and again and enjoy and never get tired of it?
The Curious Case of Walter Mosley
Mosley is the author of dozens of mystery and science fiction novels featuring Black heroes. His most famous novel is “Devil in a Blue Dress,” which features the hard-boiled, tough-as-nails private eye Easy Rawlins, portrayed by Denzel Washington in a terrific 1995 movie based on the novel.
I was astonished when this 2010 interview appeared in Moment, a Jewish magazine, and I learned that Mosley is also Jewish. He’s the son of a Jewish mother whose family fled Eastern Europe to the U.S. and a Black father who migrated from Louisiana to Los Angeles after World War II. Mosley identifies as both Jewish and Black.
Johanna Neuman:
I ask Mosley if he feels Jewish. “Sure,” he says. I ask him what it means to him to be Jewish. “In a way, to be a Jew is to be a part of a tribe,” he says. “Being a part of a tribe, you can never really escape your identity. You can be anything inside, but in the end you’re always answerable to your blood.” I ask if it’s harder to be black or Jewish in America and he pauses, eyes twinkling as he ponders the question, though he has no doubt heard it often before.
“People say to me, ‘Well, Walter, you’re both black and white.’ And I go, ‘No, I’m black, and I’m Jewish. Jews are not white people.’
I don’t know whether I agreed with this assessment of Jewishness when I first read this interview in 2010, but I agree with it now.
I am Jewish. I’m not observant. I don’t keep kosher. I haven’t set foot in a synagogue in decades. I have celebrated a lot of Christmases. I don’t look or act Jewish. I expect nearly everyone I encounter in life assumes I am not Jewish. And I’m an upper-middle-class American in the professional-managerial class. All of that makes me privileged.
And yet I am not white. I am something else. I am Jewish. I am heir to 5,000 years of history, much of which — the most recent couple of millennia — is not shared by the mainstream, Christian, Western European culture. It’s a history rich in poetry, creativity, intellectual achievements, loyalty, culture, and sheer tenacity at survival. In America, we have been made welcome as we have at no other place and time anywhere in the history of the world.
And yet to be Jewish means that all of your privileges can be taken from you in a moment. There are a lot of people in the world who hate you for your Jewishness. In America, there are a lot of people who believe Jews aren’t Americans. They think we are here on their forbearance. The current occupant of the White House and his Republican enablers are among those people, for all that they give lip service to opposing anti-Semitism.
It is Mosley’s conviction that like blacks, Jews are a race. He has called Jews “the Negroes of Europe,” noting that even in America, Jews have long been shut out of some country clubs, professions and universities, not because their religion is different but because they are. Having adapted to their surroundings, he believes, Jews may seem white, because white is the color of privilege. “One of the survival techniques of Jewish culture is to blend in to the society that you live in,” he says. “If you can speak the language and do the business and wear the clothes and join the clubs, it’s easier.” I ask if Judaism is not more of a religion than a race. “Some people can be incredibly religious and that will trump the notion of race.” But he adds with a knowing laugh, “there are very few Jews who are religious.”
Yup. Blending in. I spent a lot of energy as a boy and young man learning to do that. After that it became my nature.
Also:
I ask Mosley if he would ever write a novel with a central Jewish character. “Not if he wasn’t black,” he replies. I lift an eyebrow. “Hardly anybody in America has written about black male heroes,” he explains. “There are black male protagonists and black male supporting characters, but nobody else writes about black male heroes.” Mosley’s self-appointed job is to show these black heroes righting wrongs and protecting people, all in the name of justice, just like their white predecessors and contemporaries.
And:
In recent months, there has been a resurgence of interest in Mosley as a Jewish writer, sparked largely by Harold Heft, a former literature professor who contributed to a 1997 compendium on contemporary Jewish American novelists and noticed that Mosley had been excluded. In “Easy Call,” an article for the Jewish online magazine_ Tablet_ published in April, Heft made the case for Mosley’s inclusion in the Jewish-American literary canon, arguing that there is “a profoundly Jewish dimension” in his work. “What is a Jewish writer, and what is a Jewish theme?” Heft asked. “If a writer is unambiguously Jewish, doesn’t it follow that any story he or she commits to paper contains, by definition, Jewish themes, whether that story involves bubbe telling shtetl folktales over a steaming pot of chicken soup, or a black detective in Los Angeles living in the 1950s?”
…
To Mosley, the debate over whether he is or is not a Jewish author comes as no surprise. “It doesn’t bother me because I understand,” he told Heft last year. “You have Jewish thinkers who wouldn’t include me, because they see Jews in America as white people.”
Fifteen years ago, during Obama’s first term, when this interview was published, there was a great deal of discussion whether we’d entered into a “post-racial society.” Mosley then rejected that belief, and in retrospect he was dead right.
…he bristles at the suggestion that American society has entered into a post-racial period and has matured beyond the evil legacies of slavery and segregation. “He is distrustful of the idea that we’ve moved on,” says Derek Maus. “He understands the raisin in the batter metaphor. No matter how much you stir, you cannot assimilate the raisin into the batter.” Mosley clings proudly to the role of outsider, a view that derives as much from class as color. “I doubt he will ever write about somebody of privilege as a hero figure,” says Maus. Rarely are Mosley’s Jewish characters assimilated or wealthy. “He identifies with European Jews, with camp survivors. There is this linkage to old European Jewishness.”
Mosley has a sensible answer to the question of who has been discriminated against more, Blacks or Jews. Which was worse: Slavery or the Holocaust?
“Comparing holocausts doesn’t seem a plausible thing to me,” he says. “You look at women in the Congo today and you say, ‘I don’t know what’s harder, being black or being Jewish, but I’ll take either one as long as I don’t have to be a woman in the Congo.'”
The Techno-Utopian Seasteaders Who Want to Colonize the Ocean. By Mark Yarm at the New York Times.
AI assisted search-based research actually works now. Simon Willison:
I’ve been throwing all kinds of questions at ChatGPT (in o3 or o4-mini mode) and getting back genuinely useful answers grounded in search results. I haven’t spotted a hallucination yet, and unlike prior systems I rarely find myself shouting “no, don’t search for that!" at the screen when I see what they’re doing.
I’m trying out a new stealth photography trick, where I just hold my phone at my hip with the camera open and shoot a lot of images in burst mode, without bothering to aim precisely. Then I review the photos to see if any are good.
I like the way this one came out.
I’m not sure I feel right about posting a photo of a stranger publicly without their permission, but I’m doing it today.
Trump DOJ goon threatens Wikipedia — Latest in a trend of the right going after Wikipedia. Targeting Wikipedia is one of Project 2025’s explicit goals.
Trump pardoned Michele Fiore, a Nevada Republican who raised money to build a statue to honor a police officer killed in the line of duty, and used some of that money to pay personal costs, including plastic surgery.
Trump also pardoned Jan. 6 rioters who tried to murder police.
I hope the police remember these incidents when deciding whether to continue to support Republicans.
The theory and history of time travel — I’ll remind myself tomorrow to read this yesterday.
Shot from the hip! A street level view of 1970s New York – in pictures — Inspires me to take a lot more random, sloppy street photos and sort them out later.
Trump and his Repubican supporters are openly taking bribes, arresting judges whose actions they don’t like, building registries of Jews and autistic people, threatening to deport American citizens, some born here, putting people in concentration camps, dismantling America’s scientific and economic leadership, rewriting American history to erase Black contributions, and that’s just some damage done in their first three months. Gosh, I can’t wait to see what they get up to in May!
Here’s something I saw walking the dog this morning. The flowers are coming in at the park. The goslings are not far behind.
Responding to Trump, America’s allies are rushing to cut deals with China and remilitarizing, says Ian Welsh. “Even Japan, the most loyal of vassals, has noted that you can’t make a deal with Trump, because blackmailers always come back for more.” The outcome will be ugly for the U.S. and for Americans.
Rowling is playing edgelord from the comfort of a life so far removed from reality that the truth is just a speck in the distance. After years spent tarnishing her brand with rampant trans-exclusionary takes, she’s assured that her writing won’t define her legacy; her flagrant cowardice will.
— After J.K. Rowling’s transphobic gloating, it’s time to leave Harry Potter behind for good, by Coleman Spilde at Salon
The Very American Roots of Trumpism: Trump isn’t a freak or an outlier. He’s part of the long American tradition of illiberalism that includes Andrew Jackson, Jim Crow, Joseph McCarthy and Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback — Ezra Klein
‘Who’s our leader?’ In El Cajon, Rep. Sara Jacobs faces hundreds of residents eager to oppose Trump — San Diego Union-Tribune
Something I saw while walking the dog.
I cannot bear to throw away an empty cardboard box if it looks like a good box.
While I was walking the dog a few days ago, a car rolled up next to us and a young man rolled down his window and shouted, “THAT IS A BEAUTIFUL DOG!”
Minnie has been insufferably vain ever since.
One day more than 20 years ago, a friend was coming down from Los Angeles, about two hours away, to visit. We were going to meet up downtown. Until that day, we would have decided on a specific time and location to meet. That day, we agreed my friend would text me when he was about a half-hour out from downtown and I’d hop in my car and we’d figure out a place to meet on the fly.
This is perfectly ordinary behavior today, but at that time it felt like we were living in the future.
On a video meeting at work, someone’s dog was pestering their cat in the background. Later, someone mentioned this viral video from years ago. It’s even funnier than I remember it, and it just keeps getting better and better and more and more chaotic.
A Facebook friend commented on Robert A. Heinlein’s distinctive writing voice. I have noted this myself, and to me it is one of the pleasures of re-reading Heinlein.
It is a very, very midcentury American voice. To me, it seems strongly influenced by hard-boiled noir movies and screwball comedies. Although it is perhaps more likely that Heinlein was influenced by hardboiled authors rather than movies — maybe not Hammett and Chandler directly, but that school.
In Heinlein’s 24th Century, men drive spaceships and wear kilts, but they also smoke Lucky Strike cigarettes. Cab drivers have stogies sticking out of their mouths, and they call men “Bub” and “Mac.”
I sometimes see memes about Americans offended to hear Spanish or other foreign languages spoken publicly. Living where I do, when I go out around people, it’s unusual for me to not hear people speak Spanish or an Asian language. Somehow, I bear up under the strain of being around people minding their own business and doing things that don’t harm me in any way.
Shakespeare may not have left his wife Anne in Stratford for decades when he went to London. A researcher says a newly discovered text from a letter shows she lived with him in London, potentially upending the established belief that their marriage was unhappy. The Guardian
Phoenician culture spread across the Mediterranean not through mass migration but through cultural transmission and assimilation. “Ancient Mediterranean societies were cosmopolitan, with people from different regions trading, moving often over large distances and having offspring with each other.” The Max Planck Society
I just received an error message that says my magic link is no longer valid. My magic link is too valid. My magic link is in its PRIME.
Here’s something I saw on the sidewalk while walking the dog. Also: the dog.
The Patriotism Trap: Accepting the premise leads inevitably to the outcome. Hamilton Nolan
At 77, she’s as fit as a 25-year-old. What her body tells us about aging. The Washington Post
The evolution of the alpha male aesthetic. Bloomberg — Derek Guy walks through male style, from 19th Century bodybuilder Eugen Sandow to Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate. My style is best described as “are you sure you want to go out wearing that?”
“The Pitt’s” very horny fandom swallowed the web. Garbage Day — I love “The Pitt” but have not shipped anyone.
Please Enjoy These Images Of The 2025 Corgi Derby. Defector
Under Hegseth, Chaos Prevails at the Pentagon. NYTimes
An inside look at the New York City subway’s archaic signaling system. NYTimes — Fascinating article, beautiful photos and graphics.
How is it possible that we have lived in San Diego more than 25 years and have never been to the Creation & Earth History Museum?
The Creation and Earth History Museum is dedicated to the Biblical account of science and history. The museum showcases a literal six-day creation and young earth, including a human anatomy exhibit, life-size tabernacle display, age of the earth cave, dinosaur discovery zone and more.
For now at least, I’ve chosen to concentrate my social media activity on mitchw.blog and Facebook. I often just use Mastodon and Bluesky to send notifications that I have a new post up. I accept that costs me followers. But I don’t like it.
The platforms where I see the most activity are Facebook — which I just returned to in full force — and Tumblr. I just don’t seem to have gotten much traction on Bluesky and Mastodon.
I never was a Harry Potter fan but I admired J.K. Rowling enormously. It saddens me to see how her mind has become stunted and hateful
She has herself become like a character in a fantasy novel or comic book: a hero who became a supervillian.
I now go to an AI chatbot if I have a question, where formerly I’d do a Google search, find a website and look for the answer there. I still use a search engine if I’m looking for a particular website, which I often do.
10 TV character deaths that shocked fans. NYTimes — The death of Colonel Blake on “M*A*S*H” was and is the GOAT. It will never be topped.
But Adriana’s murder on Sopranos was respectable too.
Article author Jennifer Vineyard includes Buffy’s fake death. If I recall correctly, Buffy fake-died twice in the series. But the article fails to include the far greater death on that series: Buffy’s Mom.
This article includes a huge spoiler for a currently airing popular series.
Americans Are Obsessed With Protein and It’s Driving Nutrition Experts Nuts — The Wall Street Journal
Trump and his Republican cronies are already inflicting pain on San Diego County, damaging veterans, education, public health, business, the homeless, migrants and more.
I recently started bookmarking articles chronicling the damage that Trump and his Republican lackeys are doing to us and our neighbors here in the county. Not hypothetical damage, or harm done elsewhere in the U.S. — I was looking for concrete financial, physical and emotional damage that Trump and his Republican supporters are doing here and now.
I had no trouble finding examples. Very soon, I found myself with 50 open tabs, and my browser crashed.
This article compiles all the information I’ve been able to find. It is a looooooooong article. I’ve broken everything up into sections for easier reading. Even as long as this article is, I’m sure I missed a lot.
I originally planned to headline this article “The Trump wrecking ball…. " But this isn’t just about Trump. The entire Republican party is complicit in the damage being done to the U.S. Sadly, that includes your nice Republican city council candidate who comes to all the PTA meetings. The Republican Party has demonstrated universal obedience to Trump. Local Republicans may have been able to resist quietly, for now, in some matters, but if Trump is allowed to continue, local Republicans will soon be brought to heel.
The rally got a few hundred people. There were a dozen events throughout the county and the rally in downtown San Diego reportedly got thousands of participants. Protesters rallied nationwide
I keep forgetting you can buy prints of historical photos from Shorpy.com, unframed or framed. I think I’m going to just forget it again, on purpose.
I rebooted my Mac and the Vivaldi browser deleted about 50 open tabs in a workspace. Argh. I think I’m going to take a little break from Vivaldi for a while. And I wish software was a solid object so I could stomp on it and throw it out the window.
The president of the United States is disappearing people to a Salvadoran prison for terrorists. A prison known by its initials — CECOT. A prison built for disappearance. A prison where there is no education or remediation or recreation, because it is a prison that does not intend to release its inhabitants back out into the world. It is a prison where the only way out, in the words of El Salvador’s so-called justice minister, is a coffin.
On Monday, President Trump said, in the Oval Office, in front of the cameras, sitting next to President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, that he would like to do this to U.S. citizens, as well.
Klein goes into some detail on the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, whom the Trump administration itself admits was mistakenly sent to CECOT. The Trump administration itself admits Garcia is no terrorist or gang member. But they won’t lift a finger to get him back.
If Trump can do this to Garcia, he can do this to anyone. You, me, anyone.
Once Trump’s dictatorship is established there is no way back within the current US system. When his regime finally collapses the models for reform will be those of post-war reconstruction of a defeated and discredited state, a process which is sometimes successful, sometimes not, but always painful.
— Crooked Timber, The point of no return: Only days left to stop a totalitarian state in the US
To say the administration must observe “due process” is to beg the question: what process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors. To put it in concrete terms, imposing the death penalty on an American citizen requires more legal process than deporting an illegal alien to their country of origin.
I try to only bust out the curses when they’re warranted on this blog, but fuck everything about this. This clown who pretends to be an intellectual argues that due process, which the US Constitution guarantees to all “persons” in the 5th Amendment is more of a suggestion than a mandate.
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Vance argues that someone facing the death penalty obviously deserves more due process than someone facing deportation. But that misses the point: the purpose of due process is to determine whether the government’s charge is legitimate in the first place, not just to scale the process to the severity of the punishment.
This comes back to the simplest problem in negotiating with Trump: you can’t actually cut a deal, because he’ll always come back for more. American elites are beginning to realize that they can’t conditionally surrender: they can’t give Trump some stuff and expect to be otherwise left alone.
I think the odds of significant elite opposition are high. They don’t want to, but Trump has backed them into a corner.
This comes back to the simplest problem in negotiating with Trump: you can’t actually cut a deal, because he’ll always come back for more. American elites are beginning to realize that they can’t conditionally surrender: they can’t give Trump some stuff and expect to be otherwise left alone.
I think the odds of significant elite opposition are high. They don’t want to, but Trump has backed them into a corner.
And Zuckerberg is seeing that his paying off and sucking up to Trump and the right hasn’t bought Meta any protection. Trump is happy to take your money and sycophancy and then fuck you over anyway.
Juan Carlos Lopez Gomez, a U.S.-born citizen, was detained by ICE as an “unauthorized alien,” despite his mother’s presenting authorities with his birth certificate and Social Security card. Lopez Gomez was born in Georgia.
Hafiz Rashid at The New Republic:
He appears to have been arrested and charged under an “anti-immigration” law passed in Florida two months ago, despite the fact that the law is currently under a temporary restraining order and isn’t supposed to be enforced.
Also: ICE officers literally smashed a car window open to arrest the wrong man
He slept in caves and walked a 365-mile circle over and over for decades.
Sam Anderson at the New York Times:
In summer and in winter, in every possible kind of weather, the man wore, from head to toe, an outrageous outfit he seems to have made himself: rough leather patches stitched together with long leather strips, like a quilt. It was stiff, awkward, stinky and brutally heavy. It looked like knight’s armor made out of baseball gloves. To anyone encountering him on a quiet country lane, he must have seemed almost unreal: a huge slab of brown, twice as wide as a normal man, his suit creaking and squeaking with every step.
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The 21st century, unfortunately, turns out to be the perfect moment to be obsessed with his story. America keeps spasming, with increasing violence, in many of the same ways it spasmed in the 1800s.
And so Anderson decided to walk the Old Leatherman’s route.
A grim longread by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor at The Guardian: “The governing ideology of the far right has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism. Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them.”
[Right-wing American oligarchs] have been championing what they call “exit” – the principle that those with means have the right to walk away from the obligations of citizenship, especially taxes and burdensome regulation. Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies.
These billonaires see the world burning down and they’re not trying to stop it. They’re pouring gasoline on it. The oligarchs “believe “our planet is headed towards a cataclysm and it’s time to make some hard choices about which parts of humanity can be saved.”
How do we break this apocalyptic fever? First, we help each other face the depth of the depravity that has gripped the hard right in all of our countries. To move forward with focus, we must first understand this simple fact: we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world – on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.==
Second, we counter their apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for our collective survival. A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.
Ben Werdmuller prescribes building value-added services on top of the AT protocol while encouraging others to do the same. This is a similar business model to GitHub.
“Perhaps ironically, this vision comes closer to building an “everything app” than will ever be possible in a closed ecosystem. That’s been Elon Musk’s longtime goal for X, but Bluesky’s approach, in my opinion, is far more likely to succeed. It’s not an approach that aims to build it all themselves; it’s a truly open social web that we can all build collaboratively.”
Werdmuller also plans to lay out some prescriptions for Mastodon, and I am looking forward to reading those.
I get that Mastodon is, at least for now, open while BlueSky is, for now, as much a silo as Facebook or Twitter. But BlueSky is where the energy is, and I’d like to see it thrive and open up.
I’d also like to see the walls come down between Mastodon, BlueSky and the web. Because for now it looks like we’re rebuilding the silos of Web 2.0, but doing it with open source. Open source doesn’t matter if everything is still siloed, which it now is. And it’s painful to see Mastodon users scoff at BlueSky and BlueSky users dismiss Mastodon. We’re all on the same team here.
I’d also like to see both Mastodon and BlueSky support long posts, but I get that might be antithetical to their cultures.
If one’s name is a brand, then mine is tarnished.
—Elon Green at The New York Times
Like Green, I am a man with a relatively uncommon first name. I share that name with the recent Republican Speaker of the House. I am active in the local Democratic Club, and one of the women on the board is a sweetheart who gets quite exercised over Republican abuses. She has a thunderous voice and swears blisteringly when she’s worked up. At meetings, I’d hear her shout, “FUCKING MITCH!” and I’d flinch. “What?! What did I do?!”
When Julie and I are both out of town we board the dog at a place called Camp Bow Wow. They give us a report card for the dog and sign their emails “Furry regards.” At first, that seemed painfully twee, but who am I kidding? Do I think I’m some gangsta? I love the report cards and the furry regards.
Documentary Claims Jim Morrison Is Alive, Living in Syracuse. Break on through, Jim.
Those seven precious hours of sleep suddenly break in two. There is, if one is lucky, the “first sweet sleep of night” and the last deep sleep of morning, but between the two appears a sinister, ever widening interval."
That’s me. Or was, until I started taking Trazadone a few months ago. It’s an amazing miracle drug.
My insomnia almost always follows the same pattern: I don’t have any trouble getting to sleep at first. I fall asleep, deep and sweet, for a couple of hours, and then I get up to pee and can’t get back to sleep. I lay in bed a little while, trying various mind tricks and torturing myself with anxiety and self-loathing. Sometimes that lasts for hours, until morning. Sometimes I get up for a couple of hours, which reduces the anxiety and self-loathing but it’s not sleeping. Sometimes I can get back to sleep before the alarm goes off, but it’s not enough sleep and I stagger through the rest of the day. Sometimes I just sit there until it’s time to wash up and start the day.
I used to get insomnia attacks like that a few times a week. Now, it’s down to a couple of times a month, thanks to Trazadone.
Over a 50-year-career, Villanch worked on campy variety shows that live forever on YouTube, including the Brady Bunch Variety Hour and the Star Wars Holiday Special. They are the subject of his new book, “It Seemed Like A Bad Idea At The Time: The Worst TV Shows in History and Other Things I Wrote.”
Villanch is best known as a regular guest on Hollywood Squares, and he was head writer at the Academy Awards for 15 years. “It’s the kind of entertainment he writes for where he really excels: star-studded variety shows with big, brassy musical numbers.”
You’ll remember Villanch if you’ve seen him on TV: He’s a big, fat gay man with a blonde Prince Valiant haircut, who wears novelty T-shirts and chunky eyeglasses with frames in bright primary colors. He has a big deep voice and a sharp, fast wit.
Anytime Villanch is on an interview podcast, I’ll listen that podcast. He’s full of great old showbiz stories.
When I was a kid in the late 60s and very early 70s, there were a lot of toys that looked cool but they only did one thing and that one thing ceased to be entertaining in a few minutes.
After much nagging, my parents got us a remote-controlled toy flatbed semi-truck. The remote control operated with a wire about three feet long, and the truck was about two feet long.
You could drive the truck around the playroom a little bit. It crept along on its little wheels.
And that was it. Entertainment value for about five minutes.
Same for a toy plastic hovercraft, about a foot long, oval-shaped. You held a little motor in your hand, and the motor was attached to a long, thin hose, like the clear plastic hoses you found in a fishtank. The motor operated a fan that blew air through the hose and caused the lightweight plastic toy hovercraft to float.
You couldn’t steer the hovercraft. You could drag it around on the floor for a bit. Then what? Entertainment value: About five minutes.
It’s a cliche, but it’s true: The best toys are simple and open-ended. Blocks. Big cardboard boxes — the kind that a washing machine ships in. Snow that can make into a fort or castle.
I remember when I was about 11 years old, sitting on the floor in the playroom and building vast brutalist palaces out of Lego bricks. It was a meditative activity. You have a lot to think about when you’re 11 years old.
I host my blog on Micro.blog. It is in many ways a lovely service but I do not recommend it to others because tech support is lackadaisical. I’m low-key keeping my eyes open for alternatives, but there aren’t many and the ones that exist seem to be susceptible to the same problems as Micro.blog.
Elephants at the San Diego Zoo form an “alert circle” to protect a young elephant and each other during yesterday’s 5.2-magnitude earthquake — YouTube
The group stayed tightly together for about four minutes. A zoo spokesperson said the behavior is called an “alert circle” and said it is “intended to protect the young — and the entire herd — from threats.”
Charles Dickens was an inveterate walker, going for hours every day at a brisk pace, usually alone. “He did so because walking time was thinking time, or perhaps more accurately dreaming time.,” writes Luke McKernan.
Dickens walked in the day and in the night. He once got up at two in the morning and walked 30 miles to breakfast.
Today, McKernan lives in “the heart of Dickens territory,” Rochester and the Medway towns in England.
The high street businesses alone bear witness to the Dickensian connection: they include Tiny Tim’s Tearooms, Fezziwig’s, Mr Tope’s, Ebenezer’s, Pips of Rochester, Sweet Expectations, and the inspired A Taste of Two Cities. In days past we have had Hard Times the antique shop, and – believe it or not – the Havisham Wedding Centre, which perhaps not surprisingly went out of business.
Richard Kind Is Glad He’s Not That Famous — Fresh Air. An interview with a brilliant comic character actor whose face and voice you recognize even if you don’t know his name. He is a treasure.
“So the president of the United States proposes, on camera, to deport Americans to foreign concentration camps.” — Timothy Snyder
Unions need to be ready to strike. It’s the source of their power. “When radical things happen, only fools do not become more radical.” — Hamilton Nolan
The unbearable lightness of Korean cute — Chris Arnade walkingtheworld.substack.com
“ICE is making arrests wearing masks, not showing ID and grabbing people off the street into unmarked vans. Straight up Gestapo shit…. I can’t even count the number of actions Trump has taken which should lead to impeachment.” ianwelsh.net
Blue Cross of Louisiana doesn’t give a shit about breast cancer: The insurer pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars in payments for breast reconstructive procedures that it previously approved, on the Orwellian rationale that just because they approved it doesn’t mean they agreed to pay it. pluralistic.net
We just had an earthquake. 5.2 magnitude about 32 miles from here (near Julian). Bigger and longer than any I’ve personally experienced. No damage or injury in and around our house.
ME DURING AN EARTHQUAKE: “Um, I think we’re supposed to go outside? I’ll just get my coffee first.”
Cory Doctorow: Instead of retaliatory tariffs, US trade partners should repeal anti-circumvention laws that protect US tech monopolies. “Indeed, repealing anticircumvention is a frontal assault on the firms whose CEOs ringed Trump on the inauguration dais.” jacobin.com
Musk gets his political philosophy from a 100-year-old antisemitic and racist movement called Technocracy, which advocated replacing governments with engineers and scientists. Musk’s grandfather was a leading Technocrat who moved to South Africa because he thought apartheid was grand. nytimes.com
Elections Aren’t About Compromise— They’re About Power… Let the Consultants Burn: Democrats' fear of identity politics and wokeness convinces nonwhite voters that Democrats don’t care about them and that’s how Democrats lose. downwithtyranny.com
Crossing the U.S. Border? Here’s How to Protect Yourself theintercept.com/2025/03/2…
Gen Z is flocking to Tumblr. businessinsider.com. I’ve been on Tumblr since 2009 and I’m still active today. That makes me either “forever young” or “a creepy old guy.” I’m going to go with “creepy old guy.”
The original Star Wars is back – but what if George Lucas is right about it not being much good? Lucas said the original 1977 version was half a movie and preferred the 1997 digital remaster. theguardian.com
I was 16 when I saw “Star Wars” in 1977 in the theaters. It blew me away.
RIP Jean Marsh, who created and starred in “Upstairs, Downstairs.” She was born into the working class. “If you were very working class in those days, you weren’t going to think of a career in science,” she said in 1972. “You either did a tap dance or you worked in Woolworth’s.” nytimes.com
