Mitch's Blog

We watched an episode of Rockford Files tonight. It was the second part of a two parter, and though it had a lot of padding – plenty of scenes of Jim Rockford driving around Los Angeles – I enjoyed it anyway, just seeing the streets of Los Angeles in the 70s and all those 70s cars.

Joseph Cotten and Sharon Gless were guest stars.

Jim Rockford wears high-waisted slacks, hard shoes and a button-front sport shirt even when he’s hanging around the house trailer. He adds a snappy sport coat when he’s out on business.

I’m a board member-at-large of the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club. I wrote this up for the club newsletter:

The City of La Mesa and the La Mesa-Spring Valley School District are protecting immigrants. At our general meeting on February 5, we heard details from City Council Member Lauren Cazares and school trustee Brianna Coston.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has launched raids in San Diego County since the inauguration, including one in Escondido, Cazares said. ICE had not come to La Mesa at the time of our meeting — not yet — although there have been many rumors of ICE sightings. I checked in with Cazares over the weekend, and she said ICE still hasn’t put in an appearance in La Mesa, to her knowledge.

The City of La Mesa has not adopted a sanctuary city policy but follows California Senate Bill 54 protecting immigrants. The city adopted instructions for the La Mesa Police Department in 2017. Those instructions, amended in 2018, are still current, Cazares said.

Cazares read a section of the instructions on prohibited activity and asked that if any police officer is seen violating those policies, they should be reported to the La Mesa Police Department — although she noted there had been no violations to date that she was aware of. “There is a way for you to ensure that it is taken care of and nipped in the bud immediately,” she said.

She added, “Our chief takes the safety of La Mesans, regardless of immigration status, extremely seriously.”

The city has a police oversight board that makes an independent audit of complaints to determine if wrongdoing was done.

Ensuring adherence to the policy protecting immigrants is “on all of us in La Mesa, not just on the City Council, to ensure that it’s taken care of,” Cazares said.

Cazares provided an expansive list of prohibited police activities, including any official inquiry about a person’s immigration status; using immigration enforcement as a basis to initiate contact, detain or arrest any individual; detaining an individual based on a hold request from an immigration agency, including ICE; collecting information about a person’s immigration status, even on arrest; providing information to immigration authorities regarding a person’s release date, and more.

Republicans spreading confusion

La Mesa Republicans are spreading misinformation on Facebook about the city’s immigration policy, Cazares said. “I’m not talking about elected officials. I’m talking about people who like to tweet and go on Facebook and rant, saying the city of La Mesa is going to get sued by the federal government because of our sanctuary city status,” she said. “The city cannot be sued by the federal government because we do not have a sanctuary city policy.” And since the city’s policy went into effect in 2017, not a single judge has ruled against the city on any level. However, she noted that if California’s SB54 is brought before the current Supreme Court, that could change.

She appealed to white La Mesans to speak out on behalf of Black and brown Americans and immigrants. “It’s important that you’re able to stand up for us,” she said.

The La Mesa-Spring Valley School District is taking similar steps to protect immigrants, Coston, the school trustee, said. Contrary to rumors, ICE has not been on Spring Valley school campuses. “Yet, as Lauren said, I’m sure that will change in the future,” she said.

The district is doing a series of “Immigration: Know Your Rights” webinars in English, Spanish, Haitian-Creole, Arabic, Russian and Dari — find information here.

She added, “All children in the United States have a Constitutional right to equal access to free public education, regardless of their immigration status and regardless of the immigration status of the student’s parents or guardians,” she said. “That’s something that our school district takes very seriously. That’s something that I know a lot of the school districts in our area take very seriously.”

ICE is not supposed to go on school campuses, though President Trump has tried to remove those barriers, Coston said.

On enrollment, students or their families need to prove residency, typically with a utility bill. They need to show where the child is born, most commonly done with a birth certificate, but it can also be done with a parental affidavit. “All of our information is confidential. We do not give that information out to anyone,” Coston said. That information can’t even be given out for a subpoena. The board adopted a policy in 2018 to match state policies protecting immigrants.

ICE needs warrants to access schools

For ICE to access campus, they must show proof of a judicial warrant signed by a judge. The district immediately lets the board know and needs to contact legal counsel to validate the warrant before divulging information. “They are a guest on our campus. They have to sign in at the front office. They have to provide all sorts of information – their badge number and contact information. They will be escorted by people directly to wherever they need to be on campus."

She added, “But this is only if they have a valid judicial warrant. We do not let people onto our campus that should not be on our campus.”

Warrants need to specify who they are looking for and why. They can’t just be for general fishing expeditions on black and brown people, Coston said.

Following a bond measure in 2020, the schools installed security measures to protect against gun violence, and now all schools have a single point of entry and fences surrounding campuses. “ICE could not just accidentally wander onto a campus,” she said. “They have to go through the front door. And it isn’t unlocked. You have to get buzzed into our campus now.”

There are a lot of fake warrants floating around. But people can tap legal resources in the county to see copies of real warrants and fake warrants to learn to tell the difference, Cazares said. “Now is the time to get educated on that for all of us, not just folks who might have potential immigration issues, because often those of us who can read and write are the ones that are going to be helping people,” Cazares said.

She continued,, “My Dad has birthright citizenship. He is completely and totally functionally illiterate in English and Spanish because he graduated high school before they had ESL [English as a Second Language]. He’s very smart. He can speak English and Spanish perfectly fine.”

She continued, “Do you think someone like my Dad would be able to discern the difference between a real [warrant] and a fake one? I guarantee he would not.”

Schools have been training their whole staff, not just teachers, in immigration policies, Coston said.

Cazares also talked about several immigration bills pending in the state legislature. One is Assembly Bill 18, the California Secure Borders Act of 2025. It’s a “crazy bill,” but fortunately, it’s authored by Carl DeMaio, Cazares said. Even Republicans don’t like DeMaio, so the bill is “dead on arrival,” she said. With other Republican support, the bill might have been more viable.

On the other hand, a second bill, Senate Bill 48, would enact protections statewide similar to those in the La Mesa-Spring Valley School District, Cazares said. And Assembly Bill 15 would limit the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation from cooperating with immigration authorities.

Mitch Wagner is a member at large of the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club Board. He lives in La Mesa, a short walk from Lake Murray, with his wife, dog and cats. Contact Mitch at mitch@mitchwagner.com.

Some things I saw while walking the dog this morning

Democracy dies in darkness, and the Washington Post is turning out the lights.

It’s not just at restaurants that the dress code has become more relaxed; it’s pretty much everywhere. People don’t dress up for the theater, the opera, work or travel. Sometimes airports look more like giant sleepover parties than transportation hubs.

— Why Don’t People Dress Up to Go Out Anymore?

“American Beauty” was one of the most acclaimed movies of the 90s. But since then it’s been memory holed. Why? Oscars Rewind: How ‘American Beauty’ Lost Its Luster. At the 2000 Academy Awards, the film won five Oscars, including best picture. Then came 9/11, a tanking economy and Kevin Spacey.

Here are some things I saw while walking the dog.

Kevin Kelly shares a meaty and fascinating list of travel tips learned from wandering the world for 50 years:

Organize your travel around passions instead of destinations. An itinerary based on obscure cheeses, or naval history, or dinosaur digs, or jazz joints will lead to far more adventures, and memorable times than a grand tour of famous places. It doesn’t even have to be your passions; it could be a friend’s, family member’s, or even one you’ve read about. The point is to get away from the expected into the unexpected.

If you hire a driver, or use a taxi, offer to pay the driver to take you to visit their mother. They will ordinarily jump at the chance. They fulfill their filial duty and you will get easy entry into a local’s home, and a very high chance to taste some home cooking. Mother, driver, and you leave happy. This trick rarely fails.

…

Crash a wedding. You are not a nuisance; you are the celebrity guest! The easiest way to do this is to find the local wedding hall where weddings happen on schedule and approach a wedding party with a request to attend. They will usually feel honored. You can offer the newlyweds a small token gift of cash if you want. You will be obliged to dance. Take photos of them; they will take photos of you. It will make your day and theirs. (I’ve crashed a wedding in most of the countries I have visited.)

ProPublica: What is a pig butchering scam, and how to avoid falling victim to one.

At Taco Bell, a Romance Is Born. Bettina Makalinta and her husband went to Taco Bell on their first date. “Taco Bell isn’t ‘real’ Mexican food, but it has always, at least in my lifetime, been knowing about this: A Cheez-It tostada lands at Taco Bell, because its audience is stoners and silly people.”

Business school professors trained an AI to judge workers' personalities based on their faces. “The purpose of this automated eugenics is the same as every ‘rational’ account of hierarchy in human history: to retroactively justify winners, and to condemn losers before the game even starts.” — Cory Doctorow

Cory suggests a possible explanation, almost in passing: Assuming the test has any accuracy — a big “if” — it is simply detecting people with money and social status to make themselves look conventionally attractive.

I have decided to read Schlock Mercenary and Girl Genius. Not today. But soon.

I love this article by Joel Stein, about his fashion makeover. I laughed out loud at the headline and description alone — “A sartorial remaking, inspired by Ted Danson’s character on ‘A Man on the Inside’” — because I had the same impulse after watching the show.

My resolve to become natty only lasted a couple of days. I bought a cardigan sweater for about $110. I got away with spending much, much less money than Stein did.

I do at least want to wear nicer T-shirts. My T-shirts get stretched at the collar after I repeatedly push my massive Charlie Brown head through the neck hole.

Last night, we watched the movie “The Man From Earth.” I liked how the main character dressed: Cargo pants, a crew neck sweater and a corduroy sports jacket.

I love RSS but find all RSS clients annoying. I’m trying bazqux now and I like it.

Until a week or two ago, was sure I wanted an RSS reader that also supported email newsletters, but now I think you know what’s great for reading email? Email is great for that.

I’m looking at a 15-hour flight in about two weeks and then another one a week later. I need to try this to get an upgrade.

A big reason I enjoy reading /r/AITA is so I can say, “Yes, often I’m TA but at least I’m not that guy." I suspect this is a common motivation.

NTA. The commenters are saying she needs to leave him and they’re right. Is “Cat’s in the Cradle phase” a common name for the evolution of abusive Dads, or is it just something they’re saying here?

NTA. A person has a right to politely decline offered food for any reason or no reason at all. Good grief, people, stop being jerks.

“LPT: if a loved one is taken in an ambulance, do not follow us to the hospital. Go there on your own time and own route."

An ambulance tech on Reddit advises:

People in an emotional state following another vehicle will develop tunnel vision and forget all traffic laws. You will blow stop signs. You will follow me right through an intersection even if the light has already turned red for you. And you will slam into the back of the ambulance if we need to make a sudden stop. Remember, the patient faces backwards and can see out the back window as you blow a red light and get t-boned by an overloaded ice cream truck.

After we leave, wait ten minutes, take a deep breath and slowly make your way to the hospital.

“fresh babies” lol

Slow at the start, late bloomers are still sprinting during that final lap—they do not slow down as age brings its decay. They are seeking. They are striving. They are in it with all their heart.

— David Brooks at The Atlantic: You Might Be a Late Bloomer: The life secrets of those who flailed early but succeeded by old age

CenturyLink users struggle with multi-month outages and turn to journalists at Ars Technica for help.

Reasons to be hopeful: Jay Kuo writes about acts of resistance at the personal, political, legal and popular levels. People are doing something. In particular, Congressional Democrats aren’t just twiddling their thumbs; as the minority party in both houses and the White House, they have limited power but are using what power they have.

Chris Andrade:

One of my most enduring memories from my ten years traveling the US was being in a dive bar somewhere in Ohio when a woman got all upset that her man had went into the bathroom, locked it, and that was half hour ago and he wasn’t answering and he had history of falling asleep on the toilet and passing out and she needed help and for the next twenty minutes every man in the bar gave it their best shot – some running and throwing their shoulder against the door, some with pool cues and other improvised pry-bars, some trying to pick the lock, some with absurd Rube Goldberg like schemes – finally, one of the guys got it open by taking the door off the frame using tools from his truck and after the guy inside was woken from his concoction-of-substances induced sleep, for the next two hours the man who opened the door strutted around like the cat’s meow. He was the hero of the night and everyone bought him free drinks and that dude was one proud dude, beaming, and recounting the story of how he opened the door to everyone, including me who heard it about four times, and each time he told it, it got more impressive.

The image sticks with me because it was both so comical and telling. This was one of the divey-est dive bars in the US, with a collection of intoxicated, high, and strung out customers that didn’t discriminate by race, gender, age, or faith. Every demographic of the US was represented, with the exception of the successful and the whole scene played out with a chaotic bluster – with each actor, when it was their time in the spotlight, entering with a swaggering bravado that soon collapsed in cartoon-ish ways – a humiliating slip and fall, a crushed finger, a yelp of pain, and so on and so on until the hero finally dismantled the door only to reveal a rail thin spiky haired man sprawled on the toilet who, when woken, walked directly to the bar with an oblivious grin, ordered another drink, confused over all the buzz around his release, but loving the attention, which he used to try and hit on a woman right in front of his woman, the one that had bothered to rescue his useless ass in the first place, who quickly jerked him out of the bar like a momma cat carrying their mischievous kitten.

Behind that humor though, is an example of behavior that I’ve seen across the US, from Wall Street to trap houses, and across the world from Amman to Uganda, which is that all men need to feel like the hero, if not over the course of their lifetime, then at least every now and then. They get an immense sense of worth if they are being valued, and appreciated, for rescuing, protecting, building, and solving.

While the need to feel important isn’t exclusive to men, the roles that give them the most satisfaction (generally sacrificing their body for the greater good), and how they respond if they don’t have those roles (anger, despair, vengeance), is very different from females.

A San Diego migrant shelter run by Jewish Family Services, hailed as a national model, is shutting down and laying off 115 employees due to “changes in federal funding and policy” by the Trump administration.

I rewatched the first two episodes of the first season of “Severance” this evening. I am pleasantly surprised how much I’m enjoying it the second time around. I remember it was an extremely weird show, but I am surprised by how weird it is already.

I’m looking forward to the Kennedy Center ceremony honoring Hulk Hogan.

A Trump State Department official has repeatedly called for mass sterilization of “low-IQ trash.".

Here is something I saw walking the dog this morning: Dozens of parrots hanging out on overhead wires on the street. A neighbor said they had been making a racket a few minutes earlier.

What we’re witnessing in the US now resembles the fall of the USSR. But instead of Boris Yeltsin giving a rousing speech on top of a tank, a tiny car drives onto the Washington Mall. Then, a bunch of clowns spring out of the car, spraying confetti everywhere and hitting each other over the head with giant mallets.

Eleven years ago today, according to my journal, we were having a great deal of difficulty potty training the dog.

I found this article to be a useful guide to getting more from Grammarly. I’ve subscribed for years, but I see now there are capabilities I was not taking advantage of.

In the article, Adam Engst at TidBITS says Grammarly beats Apple Intelligence. I find that believable. I switched Apple Intelligence off all my devices; it seems to be Apple’s biggest flop since the butterfly keyboard. Apple Intelligence makes everything worse.

This building is now an animal hospital, but I feel like there must have been a private detective office in there at one time.

Please enjoy these photos of a squirrel that hung around our backyard three years ago.

The posts called for normalizing hatred of Indians, the destruction of both Israel and Gaza, and proclaimed that “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.”

Both Trump and Vance spoke out on his behalf. Vance is married to an Indian woman. cnbc.com

Self-described “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk says the WSJ reporter who doxxed Elez is “disgusting and cruel” and should be fired. mediaite.com

When fascists like Musk advocate for free speech, they are advocating for free speech for themselves, and their own right to dictate others' speech.

Cory Doctorow: The US is now being run by private equity hatchet-men, the same class of looters who suck the value from businesses, “converting their businesses from selling things to renting them out, loading them up with junk fees, slashing quality, jacking up prices over and over, and firing everyone who was good at their jobs.” pluralistic.net

These predators took down companies like Red Lobster, Toys R Us and Sears. Now they’re doing it to the United States.

Related: Dave Winer shares a link to the scene in Goodfellas where the main character explains how busting out a local restaurant works. “Fuck you. Pay me.” This is what Trump, Musk and their cronies are doing to the US now. youtu.be

In a 1995 essay, the writer reflects on Italian fascism in Mussolini’s Italy during his boyhood:

In my country today there are people who are wondering if the Resistance had a real military impact on the course of the war. For my generation this question is irrelevant: we immediately understood the moral and psychological meaning of the Resistance. For us it was a point of pride to know that we Europeans did not wait passively for liberation. And for the young Americans who were paying with their blood for our restored freedom it meant something to know that behind the firing lines there were Europeans paying their own debt in advance.

I’ve been thinking about this passage since I read the essay a few days ago. It tells me that, yes, it’s important to resist effectively — but it’s also important to just resist.

How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days

I knew this post on r/AmItheAsshole would be great as soon as I read the first sentence: “Every year, for my birthday party, I always have a very specific dress code to make for cool photos."

I’m back on Facebook but on the downlow about it.

The word for the day is “autogolpe."

The New York Times:

Together, Trump and Musk are trying to rewrite the rules of the American system. They are trying to instantiate an anti-constitutional theory of executive power that would make the president supreme over all other branches of government. They are doing so in service of a plutocratic agenda of austerity and the upward redistribution of wealth. And the longer Congress stands by, the more this is fixed in place.

If Trump, Musk and their allies … succeed, then the question of American politics won’t be if they’ll win the next election, but whether the Constitution as we know it is still in effect.

The extent to which the United States is embroiled in a major political crisis would be obvious and apparent if these events were unfolding in another country. Unfortunately, the sheer depth of American exceptionalism is such that this country’s political, media and economic elites have a difficult time believing that anything can fundamentally change for the worse. But that, in fact, is what’s happening right now.

…

At this point in any argument like this one, the question arises of what should be done and, more critically, what can be done? The sad answer is not that much. Those with the direct institutional power to slam the brakes lack the will and those with the will lack the power.

If Trump and Musk’s opponents have a tool to use, it is the power to shape public opinion – to show as many of the American people who will listen that something truly malign and radical has hijacked the normal functioning of the federal government. And it is to the advantage of those opponents that Trump and Musk’s efforts to commandeer the executive branch are taking shape side by side with serious accidents – like the deadly airplane crash near Ronald Reagan National Airport last week – that dramatize the importance of a competent, apolitical civil service.

… marginal Trump voters – the voters who gave him his victory – did not vote for any of this. They voted specifically to lower the cost of living. They did not vote, in Musk’s words, for economic “hardship.” Nor did they vote to make Musk the co-president of the United States or to give Trump the power to destroy the capacity of the federal government to do anything that benefits the American people. They certainly did not vote for a world where the president’s billionaire ally has access to your Social Security number.

… his voters did not anticipate anything other than a return to the status quo before the pandemic. What they’re getting instead is a new crisis pushed on by a dangerous set of corrupt oligarchs and monomaniacal ideologues. As dangerous as the president and his allies are, however, their hold on government is not as total or complete as they imagine. The president’s opponents, in other words, still have room to maneuver.

But as those opponents strategize their response, it is vital that they see the important truth that there is no going back to the old status quo. President Trump and Elon Musk really have altered the structure of things. They’ve taken steps that cannot be so easily reversed. If American constitutional democracy is a game, then they’ve flipped the board with the aim of using the same pieces to play a new one with their own boutique rules.

And so the president’s opponents, whoever they are, cannot expect a return to the Constitution as it was. Whatever comes next, should the country weather this attempted hijacking, will need to be a fundamental rethinking of what this system is and what we want out of it.

Platformer:

… deep research is available only to subscribers of ChatGPT’s $200-a-month P⁠⁠ro tier. (Users are limited to 100 deep research queries a month, reflecting the high cost of the computation involved; for now, it’s accessible only on the web.) To use it, you type out your query as usual in the ChatGPT chat box and then click the “deep research” button.

ChatGPT then analyzes your query and asks you follow-up questions. When I asked for a report on a current subject of interest – how publishers can benefit from the Fediverse – the bot asked me four clarifying questions, such as whether I was looking from the perspective of a legacy publisher or a digital-only outlet, and how technical it should get in its analysis of the tradeoffs between using two different federated protocols. I answered those questions, and deep research got to work.

Like DeepSeek, OpenAI’s deep research exposes some of its chain of thought as it answers your query. This let me see some of the websites that the agent was visiting, what conclusions it was drawing from them, and how it was beginning to organize its reasoning. Five minutes later, my 4,955-word report was available. (Read the whole thing here.) It outlined how the Fediverse can help people find new news sources; offered real-world examples of how sites like The Verge and 404 Media are leaning in to federation; explored different monetization strategies and described the trade-offs involved with each; and analyzed the pros and cons of building on the two main federated protocols.⁠⁠

Today in Tabs:

It’s both more and less than it seems, and as alarming as the facts are, I can’t find any evidence that anything permanent has been done yet. It’s a coup that’s only happening on the computer so far, which is real but it’s not… entirely real, you know?

A couple of real things have happened. They’re attempting to shut down USAID, because it was instrumental in helping to end apartheid in South Africa, which Elon Musk and his mother are still mad about because they are literally apartheid South African white supremacists, notoriously the Worst People In The World for all of recent history. He’s also going after South Dakota Lutherans? The reasons for that one are less clear to me, but as the old poem goes, “…Then they came for the midwestern Lutherans, and I said ‘Ope!'" That poem was actually written by a Lutheran, so maybe that’s the connection. At this point who knows.

Here’s a website clarifying what will be lost if USAID is actually shut down, but right now, USAID is a still a Federal Government agency chartered by Congress, and it still exists by law. Whoever is preventing it from carrying out its Congressionally mandated work is breaking the law…. Every coup has a period where the people perpetrating it are breaking the law, and either they will succeed in taking over the apparatus of the state and change the law, or not. Right now we’re in the period of uncertainty, as we have been for at least five days, and the longer that uncertainty stretches out, the more exposed these criminals are.

…

Donald Trump is a gutless bully … who has never experienced love or contentment or true human warmth, and never will, and that’s a fatal weakness.⁠⁠

Ian Welsh::

I think a lot of this comes down to something we’ve talked about before. “You go for the King, you’d better not miss.” I warned, repeatedly, that prosecution of Trump was an all-or-nothing matter. You either take him out, completely, or you’re fucked, because you’ve destroyed an elite norm against going after ex-Presidents seriously. (Note that Trump said he’d prosecute Hilary Clinton, but never did.)

Trump’s first actions have included a purge of law enforcement and prosecutors who went after him, the people who tried to help him steal the 2000 election, and his January 6th shock troopers.

What the hell did Democrats expect? That they could prosecute Trump and his people and that if he got back into power he’d shrug it off? How fucking stupid are these people?

If you prosecuted Trump, you had to make it stick and throw him in prison and take every red cent he had. You don’t go after an ex-President who still has a power base without making sure you finish him off.

The bloody fools.

In some respects Trump is just self-protecting. He has to take control of the Justice system so that when he leaves office he’s safe, at least, from any sort of Federal prosecution and with his loyalists in charge of the Justice system, attempts to end-run using the State system can be countered by simple threats. “If you do, we’ll go after your people, and we’re a lot more powerful.)

Trump is taking control of government: the treasury system and all expenditures, and the legal enforcement system. No one will be prosecuted who he doesn’t want prosecuted. No one will get money whom he doesn’t want to get money. Anyone he does want prosecuted will be and anyone who wants to have money, will have money.

Is it a coup? That depends on intention. Does he intend to step down in 2028 and allow free and fair elections? Or does he intend to make sure that elections are only a fig-leaf and he, or more likely given his age, his chosen successor is essentially appointed?

Trump could just intend to punish his immediate enemies and make sure the government does exactly what he wants, or he could intend to turn this into a permanent Republican state, with at least his successor chosen by him.

If he really wants to be safe, well, he needs to appoint his successor.⁠⁠

Any jackass can kick a barn down. But it takes a carpenter to build one.

— LBJ on the Difference between Republicans and Democrats

I’ve decided to reread favorite books instead of compulsively scrolling social media and news. I am starting with “The World According to Garp” by John Irving.

This is an odd choice for a comfort read because much of the book is about the emotional trauma of sexual violence and betrayal.

I see a lot of people want to throw out 230 years of constitutional government and replace it with an authoritarian dictator because they have big feelings about the budget and can’t be bothered to work through Congress. That will surely work out well.

— Brian Riedl, senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, on X

Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge::

At Musk’s functional companies — SpaceX and to some degree, Tesla — he’s put in a playpen where he can’t damage the real work. At Twitter, we saw what happened when there was no padding between him and the company: he began switching things off at random, firing engineers willy-nilly (and then trying to rehire them), and turning its revenue into a giant bonfire. Now Musk has brought this strategy to the federal government.

…

Let’s say Musk gets direct access to treasury payments, which seems very likely to be his aim. Will he stop paying bills, as he did with Twitter’s leases? Might be fun to discover what the military does when they don’t get their paychecks, or how many grandparents get evicted when the Social Security checks don’t go out. How many of Musk’s unsecured servers do you think foreign spies have penetrated already? All of them, maybe?

…

Does Musk have the authority to do this? Doesn’t matter. As we know from previous Musk experience, the real question is: who will stop him? So far the answer appears to be no one. The CIA, FBI, and NSA appear to be doing nothing. The US attorney’s office in DC is threatening individuals and groups who “appear to violate the law in targeting DOGE employees.” The Democratic party is making strongly worded statements and issuing letters of concern.

The stiffest resistance Musk is getting to his unconstitutional romp through the inner workings of the American government is from the workers themselves — both through union lawsuits and through a simple refusal to do as he asks.

…

We are all supposed to pretend this is happening in the name of efficiency and cost-savings, and not as a way for Musk to pursue his shitty personal feuds.

Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day runs down the coup in progress and its main characters:

These are the demagogues, oligarchs, and literal teenage boys tearing apart our government right now. They are fueled by Silicon Valley’s dream of a monarchist network state and blood and soil white nationalism and they want to replace our money with the speculative cryptocurrencies they’re already holding, replace the country’s digital infrastructure with X, an online platform they invested in, and route all federal power to Trump, a president they’re actively bribing. They did not plan any of this in secret. They know this their moment and the coup is underway. They are serious. And every day they’re in power means more years, if not decades, of our lives that we will have to dedicate to trying to piece the country back together when they’re gone.

Also: The US Vs. China Vs. Everyone Else. The Grammys. And more

Good news: Hulu is making plans for a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” follow up series with Sarah Michelle Gellar reprising her role and executive producing. Also executive producing: Dolly Parton!

Don’t let anybody tell you blogging is dead. One blog post helped crash Nvidia’s stock by $600B and set off a Silicon Valley market panic.

We watched All Creatures Great & Small: Season 5 (2024): Episode 4 - Uninvited Guests. I suspect Tricki is an Axis spy.

Trump has the second-lowest approval rating and highest disapproval rating of any newly elected President.

Who had the lowest approval rating? Trump in this first term.

John Gruber: “Don’t let anyone tell you this guy is popular or that the country is trending his way. Just isn’t true. Never was.”

We watched Star Trek: Deep Space Nine 1x03 “Past Prologue”. I believe Garak may be more than just a simple tailor.

Non-obvious benefits to working from home: Privacy for your bathroom breaks, don’t have to take PTO to wait for the cable guy, monitoring the slow cooker, farting freely.

“I think what Matt is saying is that he’s been financing the development of WordPress and his competitors have been getting a free ride."

Chuck Schumer seems useless. He makes Neville Chamberlain look like Rambo.

It’s a dog food slop breakfast.

I love this image of reading. We’ve all been there, if not with a donkey in tow.

Source: [Pursuit of knowledge under difficulties] by Wordsworth Thompson, chromolithograph (L. Prang & Co.), 1878., Library of Congress, Popular Graphic Arts Collection, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016649779/.

My Kindle Paperwhite is a tank. Twelve years old and still fine. It takes 30 seconds to open a book from the main menu, but once that’s done page-turning is fast and smooth. Nicely done, Amazon.

NYTimes: Frozen fruits and vegetables are as good as fresh — often better..

Musk forced out the head of the FAA ten days ago, after the FAA fined SpaceX for failing to comply with safety regulations. Trump appointed a replacement today — after the D.C. disaster.

Trump’s Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, is a former contestant on MTV’s “The Real World” and worked as a host on Fox Business. “The other top-ranking Trump Cabinet member tasked with dealing with fallout from the crash is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is also a former Fox News host.”

Like the saying goes: When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become king. The palace turns into a circus.

Eight days ago, Trump proudly proclaimed he “ends DEI madness” and “restores excellence and safety within the Federal Aviation Administration.”

Trump’s delusions killed hundreds of thousands of Americans in his last term in office. He’s just getting started this time.

I see that OpenAI is claiming DeepSeek improperly harvested data. Must be terrible to have other people profit off your work.

Trump lost no time in fitting the DC crash tragedy into his toxic anti-woke delusions.

I have never explored AO3 much, but I saw a mention of it on Tumblr and figured, why not take a look?

I cast around in my mind for my all-time favorite TV shows to see if there might be fic for them. I thought of “Hill Street Blues.”

“No way there is ‘Hill Street Blues’ fic,” I thought. “That show’s been off the air more than 30 years, and it’s barely been on streaming.”

But I was wrong. There is “Hill Street Blues” fic. JD LaRue and Henry Goldblume seem to be popular characters.

Maybe I’ll check for old-time radio fic. “The Jack Benny Show.” “Fibber McGee and Molly.”

I have a blog hosted on Micro.blog, and I’m active on BlueSky, Tumblr and Mastodon. I post mostly the same things in all those places.

I go back and forth on the issue of whether to post natively to all those platforms or just post once to Micro.blog and move on, relying on Micro.blog’s excellent built-in cross-posting tools to spread the word to the other places.

Every solution I’ve found is unsatisfactory.

The social Internet needs a model similar to podcasting, where folks can publish on whatever platform they prefer — Micro.blog, Facebook, WordPress, Ghost, Tumblr, Mastodon, BlueSky, Facebook, LinkedIn, Threads, whatever — and other folks can read on whatever platform they prefer, and everything is readable in native format. Dave Winer calls that textcasting.

Instead, we seem to be replicating proprietary silos but using open protocols, which is better than proprietary silos with proprietary protocols. But it’s far from ideal.

Mike Masnick: The ATProtocol is a technological poison pill that sabotages enshittification. Even the potential of competition serves to protect against BlueSky following Twitter’s trajectory.

Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky wants to bring back the smartwatch his company invented. He wants to build a simple smartwatch with an e-paper screen that’s hackable, doesn’t do too much and has a long-lasting battery.

He doesn’t want to fix or upgrade the original Pebble because he says it still works just fine. Indeed, he still wears one, and has a boxful of spares.

I’d be a potential customer if they can get it working well with the iPhone. I love my Apple Watch, but I only use its most basic features: Notifications, weather, very basic fitness tracking, telling time and alarms.

I don’t do anything fancy with my Apple Watch, and I’d be happy with something that does a lot less, costs a lot less, and has much longer battery life.

Also, the Pebble was and still is a nice-looking watch. Cute and gadgety. Not a piece of fancy jewelry like a high-end mechanical watch, but it looks nice for everyday wear. Having one of those on your wrist brands you as a nerd, and you can instantly bond with fellow nerds.

How to Take Heart From What Really Worked in the First Resistance

Theda Skocpol at The New Republic:

Marches and lawsuits are fine, but the real wins over MAGA last time were powered by grassroots activists pushing from thousands of districts across the country.

Grassroots resisters successfully fought Trump during his first term by focusing on how policies hurt local communities and real people.

“You spend too much time reading…. You know more stuff that don’t make you money than anybody I know.”
― Robert B. Parker, Mortal Stakes

I will get kicked out of the Apple nerd club for saying this: Usually, I write reports in Markdown and convert them to Word before submitting to my editors. But I’ve been writing a report in Microsoft Word today, and it’s fine. It’s easier than converting, which always needs a lot of manual fixing.

Josh Marshall reflects on Leslie Nielsen’s transformation from a forgettable 1950s-era B-movie leading man to the star of “Airplane” and the Naked Gun movies.

It wasn’t just that Nielsen wasn’t a comedy actor. Nielsen specialized in a genre of mid-20th century American male screen roles from which all traces of comedy or irony were systematically removed through some chemical process in pre-production or earlier. He was the straightest of straight men. That’s what made his comedic roles – playing against that type or rather playing the same type in a world suddenly revealed as absurd – just magic.

There’s a great life lesson here about hope and the unknown, I’ve always thought, for those willing to see it, whatever our age. When Airplane! premiered, Nielsen was 54 years old, well into mid-life and at a stage when most of us are thinking more about what we have accomplished than what we will. It is certainly not like Nielsen had been any sort of professional failure in life. Far from it. He’d worked successfully as an actor for three decades. And yet not only was the story not over; it was really only beginning.

Years later, after his true calling as a comedic actor was widely recognized, he told an interviewer that rather than playing against type, comedy is what he’d always wanted to do. He just hadn’t had a chance. This makes me think of a gay man who only lets himself come out in the middle or late in life and yet still has a chance – enough time – to live as himself.

Very relevant to me personally. I’m at a time of life when most people are thinking about retiring and yet I feel I have so much to do!

Josh Marshall: Grant was a clear thinker, which was essential to his battlefield victories, political integrity and unexpected greatness as a memoirist. His reputation was diminished during the 20th Century, part of the wrongful valorization of the Confederacy.

David Graeber’s 2002 proposal for replacing our current global political systems of top-down organizations with systems based on consensus democracy.

More and more, activists have been trying to draw attention to the fact that the neoliberal vision of ‘globalization’ is pretty much limited to the movement of capital and commodities, and actually increases barriers against the free flow of people, information and ideas – the size of the US border guard has almost tripled since the signing of NAFTA. Hardly surprising: if it were not possible to effectively imprison the majority of people in the world in impoverished enclaves, there would be no incentive for Nike or The Gap to move production there to begin with. Given a free movement of people, the whole neoliberal project would collapse. This is another thing to bear in mind when people talk about the decline of ‘sovereignty’ in the contemporary world: the main achievement of the nation-state in the last century has been the establishment of a uniform grid of heavily policed barriers across the world. It is precisely this international system of control that we are fighting against, in the name of genuine globalization.

…

At the FTAA [Free Trade Area of the Americas] summit in Quebec City last summer, invisible lines that had previously been treated as if they didn’t exist (at least for white people) were converted overnight into fortifications against the movement of would-be global citizens, demanding the right to petition their rulers. The three-kilometre ‘wall’ constructed through the center of Quebec City, to shield the heads of state junketing inside from any contact with the populace, became the perfect symbol for what neoliberalism actually means in human terms.

…

… this is a movement about reinventing democracy. It is not opposed to organization. It is about creating new forms of organization. It is not lacking in ideology. Those new forms of organization are its ideology. It is about creating and enacting horizontal networks instead of top-down structures like states, parties or corporations; networks based on principles of decentralized, non-hierarchical consensus democracy. Ultimately, it aspires to be much more than that, because ultimately it aspires to reinvent daily life as whole….

Over the past decade, activists in North America have been putting enormous creative energy into reinventing their groups' own internal processes, to create viable models of what functioning direct democracy could actually look like. In this we’ve drawn particularly, as I’ve noted, on examples from outside the Western tradition, which almost invariably rely on some process of consensus finding, rather than majority vote. The result is a rich and growing panoply of organizational instruments – spokescouncils, affinity groups, facilitation tools, break-outs, fishbowls, blocking concerns, vibe-watchers and so on – all aimed at creating forms of democratic process that allow initiatives to rise from below and attain maximum effective solidarity, without stifling dissenting voices, creating leadership positions or compelling anyone to do anything which they have not freely agreed to do.

The basic idea of consensus process is that, rather than voting, you try to come up with proposals acceptable to everyone – or at least, not highly objectionable to anyone: first state the proposal, then ask for ‘concerns’ and try to address them. Often, at this point, people in the group will propose ‘friendly amendments’ to add to the original proposal, or otherwise alter it, to ensure concerns are addressed. Then, finally, when you call for consensus, you ask if anyone wishes to ‘block’ or ‘stand aside’. Standing aside is just saying, ‘I would not myself be willing to take part in this action, but I wouldn’t stop anyone else from doing it’. Blocking is a way of saying ‘I think this violates the fundamental principles or purposes of being in the group’. It functions as a veto: any one person can kill a proposal completely by blocking it – although there are ways to challenge whether a block is genuinely principled.

…

… creating a culture of democracy among people who have little experience of such things is necessarily a painful and uneven business, full of all sorts of stumblings and false starts, but – as almost any police chief who has faced us on the streets can attest – direct democracy of this sort can be astoundingly effective. And it is difficult to find anyone who has fully participated in such an action whose sense of human possibilities has not been profoundly transformed as a result. It’s one thing to say, ‘Another world is possible’. It’s another to experience it, however momentarily. Perhaps the best way to start thinking about these organizations – the Direct Action Network, for example – is to see them as the diametrical opposite of the sectarian Marxist groups; or, for that matter, of the sectarian Anarchist groups. Where the democratic-centralist ‘party’ puts its emphasis on achieving a complete and correct theoretical analysis, demands ideological uniformity and tends to juxtapose the vision of an egalitarian future with extremely authoritarian forms of organization in the present, these openly seek diversity. Debate always focuses on particular courses of action; it’s taken for granted that no one will ever convert anyone else entirely to their point of view. The motto might be, ‘If you are willing to act like an anarchist now, your long-term vision is pretty much your own business’. Which seems only sensible: none of us know how far these principles can actually take us, or what a complex society based on them would end up looking like. Their ideology, then, is immanent in the anti-authoritarian principles that underlie their practice, and one of their more explicit principles is that things should stay this way.

Finally, I’d like to tease out some of the questions the direct-action networks raise about alienation, and its broader implications for political practice. For example: why is it that, even when there is next to no other constituency for revolutionary politics in a capitalist society, the one group most likely to be sympathetic to its project consists of artists, musicians, writers, and oth- ers involved in some form of non-alienated production? Surely there must be a link between the actual experience of first imagining things and then bringing them into being, individually or col- lectively, and the ability to envision social alternatives – particularly, the possibility of a society itself premised on less alienated forms of creativity? One might even suggest that revolutionary coalitions always tend to rely on a kind of alliance between a society’s least alienated and its most oppressed; actual revolutions, one could then say, have tended to happen when these two categories most broadly overlap.

This would, at least, help explain why it almost always seems to be peasants and craftsmen – or even more, newly proletarianized former peasants and craftsmen – who actually overthrow capitalist regimes; and not those inured to generations of wage labour. It would also help explain the extraordinary importance of indigenous people’s struggles in the new movement: such people tend to be simultaneously the very least alienated and most oppressed people on earth.

John Gruber: ICE raids are an escalation of our long-simmering de facto cold civil war

The raids are focused on deep blue cities in blue states. Because undocumented workers “make up a remarkably large sector of the U.S. economy,” these raids are a “de facto economic attack on blue states.”

Hamilton Nolan:

… [for] thousands of years and around the globe, the primary purpose of all the work that everyone is doing is “allowing a few jerks and their unbearable kids to live lavishly.” Countless millions through millennia have suffered, dragging stones to build pyramids and losing fingers in dirty factories and getting black lung so that Some Guy Somewhere can sit on a soft pillow and enjoy delicacies.

What an absurd, idiotic goal to organize human society around. Wow!

The seed of all reform and revolution is planted simply by sitting and thinking about how fucking asinine this system is. Really, we all have to be peasants working in fields so the king can live in a castle? That’s the reason? We have to spend our days in coal mines so the CEO can have a grand apartment? We have to spend all day getting repetitive motion injuries in a warehouse so Jeff Bezos can buy a yacht so big that he asked for a historic bridge to be dismantled in order to sail it through? All of this sweat and toil and misery is arranged in service of that? What the fuck?

The “operational benefits” of technology — better drugs, an “easlier way to order toothpaste,” electric cars — are side-effects of the main task of making the super-rich even richer, Nolan says.

Capping the accumulation of personal wealth could go a long way to solving societal problems, Nolan argues. Maybe the cap is $1 billion, maybe higher, maybe lower, maybe a sliding scale based on the total wealth of the entire world. The main point is not the number; the main point is having a cap.

Jamelle Bouie: Trump Doesn’t Get to Decide What the Constitution Means.

The meaning of the 14th Amendment is plain. Trump can’t end birthright citizenship with the stroke of a pen.

Republicans claimed Constitutional originalism was a bulwark of their party. That was a lie.

Overheard: “just learned about recency bias and its my favorite thing ever”

Taylor Lorenz: Why are people talking about “cute winter boots” on TikTok? They’re adopting “algospeak” to get around anticipated American censorship.

"… in a few days, there will be no one in prison or facing any sort of criminal penalty for their actions at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021."

Here’s something I saw while walking the dog

Pete Hegseth, our new Secretary of Defense, appeared on a podcast last year endorsing dangerous fanatical views including “sphere sovereignty,” which advocates subordinating “civil government” to Old Testament law and the death penalty for homosexuality and other so-called violations.

Hegseth is as nutty and dangerous as a cyanide fruitcake, and he’s also a drunk and now he’s running the largest armed forces in the world. I’m sure this will be fine.

A brief history of 80 years of radio station ID jingles. “We pack in so many earworms, you’re going to need an exterminator.” On the Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast.

Instead of defending American consumers and small businesses, Trump and his allies are going after the imaginary threats of “wokeness” and DEI.

Trump will prosecute predatory businesses, but only those who oppose him. Businesses that support Trump will be free to lie, cheat and steal.

Cory Doctorow has more.

Washington Democrats feel like they need to be less antagonistic to Trump this time around, lest they appear “shrill” and “cringe.”

Are you fucking kidding me?

Democats say they need a better messaging strategy. They think they should have more moments like a viral video during the pandemic of Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) making a tuna melt.

Are you fucking kidding me? Tuna melt?

Washington Democrats don’t need a messaging strategy. They need spines.

Me clicking on a restaurant website: I wonder when they’re open and what they serve

Restaurant website: O U R M I S S I O N

— @PavelASamsonov@mastodon.social

Glad to hear that ActivityPub support is still in the pipeline for Tumblr. It’s a little thing, but it’s a bright spot in an otherwise shit week.

AI business leaders are talking about “AI workers” and “AI employees.” But artificial intelligences aren’t people — they’re machines. Calling them workers or employees sets up further exploitation of actual, human workers.

Also:

Across America, CEOs are ordering their workers to experiment with AI, while workers are googling “how do I turn Copilot off?”

Save your outrage: Elon Musk’s inauguration salute is just another distracting meme . The new administration will bring four years of far more important battles.

Jan. 20 was a day as historic as the fall of the USSR. As Ezra Klein says: It wasn’t just a change of administration — it was a regime change.

Now what?

The national Democratic Party is still playing by the pre-2025 rules. Bipartisanship, coalition-building, winning the votes of persuadable Republicans. That won’t work anymore. The national Democratic Party needs to wake the fuck up.

Being a person with deadly, incurable cancer who is nonetheless still alive for an indefinite timeframe gives me an interesting metaphor that helps me deal with things like large-scale corruption in government or commerce.

So, there are times when I need to pay attention to the cancer, like, when I have to go to doctor’s appointments, take a medication on time, or make choices regarding self-care to increase my quality of life. But when I am not doing those things, thinking about the cancer is actively harmful.

There are moments when I feel okay, and my daughter wants to play a video game with me. Or I have the chance to see a cool movie, or the urge to write a story. I cannot do these things if I am paralyzed with horror and dismay thinking in detail about what’s happening in my body.

— @mishellbaker.bsky.social

I am blessed with good health, but this is how I think about Trump 2.0. I do a bit of volunteer work for the local Democratic Party. I try to spend an appropriate amount of time on news and social media — but no more than appropriate. And otherwise, I get on with life.

Rebuilding the U.S. is going to be a long process. I probably will not live to see the end of it. Outrage is exhausting, and exhaustion is another form of defeat.

Jeff Bezos is the autocrat of trade that John Sherman warned us about, 135 years ago. And Kier Starmer just abdicated in his favour.

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr

This is an excellent list of all the Star Trek movies, ranked, though I can argue with a few points: The list gives high marks to “Star Trek VI,” whereas I found it disappointing. It looked cheaply made and the story was a “Law & Order” episode.

The list ranks “Star Trek V” as the worst Trek movie. I thought it was fine. Kirk hams it up, there’s a bullshit metaphysical theme and plenty of action. That’s what I come to “Star Trek” for.

My biggest argument with the list: It excludes “Galaxy Quest,” the Star Trek movie GOAT.

Jules Feiffer, a ‘smartass’ Jew whose work spanned comics and cinema, dies at 95.

He filleted the neuroses and narcissism of the age, but also the misrule of its leaders, showing, for instance, a young boy watching a series of consecutive presidents giving televised speeches on the war in Vietnam ending. The boy gets older until, at last, he’s in a flag-draped coffin.

…

One characteristic comic, which seems to have anticipated the term mansplaining – or the Me Generation – shows a couple at a restaurant. The man releases a flurry of “Me"s. When his date, a woman, responds with a solitary “I,” he yawns.

Here’s something I received in email last night.

We’ve been watching 70s TV mysteries. Rockford, Columbo, McMillan & Wife, McCloud.

Ascots need to make a comeback.

Please enjoy this visual metaphor for the state of my resolution to stop doomscrolling.

Musk did a Nazi salute at a rally. Twice. And people are trying to explain away what they plainly saw.