Mitch Wagner

Here’s something I saw while I was walking the dog: This fairy village, which we pass by every few days. They’ve arranged it nicely since the last time I stopped to take a close look.

Natasha Dangoor at The Wall Street Jourrnal:

When Carlos Gomez’s recent flight from Guadalajara was delayed, he asked a gate attendant why. It wasn’t weather or crew shortages. There were 25 wheelchair passengers holding up boarding.

There were no such delays when Gomez’s flight landed. Most of the same passengers stood up without assistance and bounded off toward the baggage claim.

Social media has credited a divine intervention for this sudden return to mobility. An enigmatic “Jetway Jesus” is curing these passengers by the time they land, and the remarkable recovery acts have been dubbed “miracle flights.”

This year I traveled with someone who legitimately used a cane to walk, and it occurred to me that if I simply carried a foldable cane with me in my travel kit, I could get VIP treatment. But I only gave it a second’s thought and decided that would be a terrible idea, because I am not a psycho.

For this multimedia report, The New York Times joined a Ukrainian drone team at the front to understand how cheap drones have changed combat as we know it. The equipment is hacked together — the explosive looks like it’s contained in a plastic soda bottle. By Mauricio Lima, Andrew E. Kramer and Josh Holder.

This drone team, part of the 34th marine brigade, works in two rooms. One is cluttered with wires, antennas, zip ties, duct tape and soldering irons to modify the drones. The other holds the explosives. A wood stove provides comfort in cold weather.

The ingenuity is wonderful and the butcher’s bill (to use an old-fashioned phrase) is horrible.

Gwilym Mumford at The Guardian::

Bohemian Rhapsody is a deeply weird mega hit, a song that explodes all the usual rules of success. Everywhere you look there are contradictions. It’s a multimillion seller that has no chorus, numerous tempo and key changes, ambiguous and difficult-to-parse lyrics and a long running time. Musically, with its Gilbert and Sullivan operetta leanings, it has more in common with the 19th century than the 20th, let alone the 21st, but it’s also the most streamed 20th-century song this century, a musical throwback that nevertheless dragged pop into the music-video age. It’s both celebrated as a queer anthem or an extended metaphor for coming out, and is the British armed forces’ favourite song. It’s an extremely silly, borderline novelty hit that is also sort of deeply serious: “If I’m not back again this time tomorrow/ Carry on, carry on as if nothing really matters.”

The phrase “this ain’t my first rodeo” goes back at least as far as the 1981 movie “Mommie Dearest,” where Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford proclaims, “Don’t fuck with me fellas! This ain’t my first time at the rodeo” to a room of high-powered male executives trying to get the better of her in a business deal. A Way With Words: “Earlier forms of this expression involve such activities as a goat roping, a goat race, pumpkin picking, or a frog race.” “This Ain’t My First Rodeo” was also the title of a 1990 country song.

Fresh Air rebroadcasts its September interview with Rob Reiner, which includes a previously-unaired segment where Reiner talks about “Being Charlie, a 2015 film he collaborated on with his son Nick Reiner. The film was a semiautobiographical story of addiction and homelessness, based on Nick’s own experiences. Nick Reiner was arrested Sunday evening after Rob and Michele Reiner were found dead inside their California home.”

I clicked on this linkbait headline: “5 Forgotten ’90s Sci-Fi Movies That Still Hold Up Today” and was pleased to see the list includes “Robot Jox,” with a screenplay co-written by our friend Joe Haldeman.

The premise is that nations have replaced war with one-on-one combat between champions piloting five-story weaponized robot suits. “It’s a silly conceit, of course, but it’s no less absurd than the current war model. Why bomb out cities and murder thousands when you can build a giant robot with a chainsaw penis?”

Spotify Wrapped has proven hugely popular, and now everybody is doing it. I’m getting year-in-review notifications from many of the apps and services I use. I hope my urologist doesn’t want to get in on the action.

The only thing better than Walton Goggins is noseless Walton Goggins.

John Scalzi:

… very few people, much less filmmakers, had the sort of career run that he had as a director between 1984 and 1992: This is Spinal Tap. The Sure Thing. Stand by Me. The Princess Bride. When Harry Met Sally. Misery. A Few Good Men.

I mean, come on. With the exception of The Sure Thing, every single one of those is a stone classic, and The Sure Thing is still pretty good! It made a star out of John Cusack! There are things we still say because Rob Reiner directed the film those words were in: “This one goes to 11.” “As you wish.” “You can’t handle the truth,” and so on. You could go a whole day talking to people by only quoting Rob Reiner films and you could absolutely get away with it.

“[Rob Reiner’s] films have a certain comedy style … a sweetness and toughness…. Stand by Me is not just about four kids coming of age before junior high school — they’re going to see a corpse. If John Hughes had made Stand by Me — and I’m not knocking Hughes — they would have been searching for a convertible.”

— Rob Reiner, ‘When Harry Met Sally,’ ‘The Princess Bride’ and ‘Stand by Me’ Director and ‘All in the Family’ Actor, Dies at 78 in Apparent Homicide (Report)

RIP Rob Reiner and his wife in an apparent homicide. How terrible. He was a great talent and a mensch.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off came out the summer before I was a senior in high school, which meant when I watched it I was very much oh, here’s a role model. Not for the skipping of school precisely; I went to a boarding school and lived in a dorm, skipping days was a rather more complicated affair than it would have been in a public school. But the anarchic style, the not taking school more seriously than it should be taken, the willingness to risk a little trouble for a little freedom — well, that appealed to me a lot.

Before you ask, no, I did not, become a True Acolyte of Ferris. I lived in the real world and wanted to get into college, and while at the time I could not personally articulate the fact that inherent in Ferris’ ability to flout the system was a frankly immense amount of privilege, I understood it well enough. Ferris gets his day off because he’s screenwriter/director John Hughes’ special boy. The rest of us don’t have that luck. Nevertheless, if one could not be Ferris all the time, would it still be wrong to have a Ferris moment or two, when the opportunity presented itself? I thought not. I had my small share of Ferris moments and didn’t regret them.

…

There has been the observation among Gen-Xers that you know you’re old when you stop identifying less with Ferris and more with Principal Rooney (this is also true when applied to the students of The Breakfast Club and Vice-Principal Vernon).

— John Scalzi, “The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day Twelve: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”

I liked but did not love “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” I loved “The Breakfast Club,” and am a little abashed at that because I saw it when I was 25 years old — well older than the target demo. Y

es, I did come to sympathize with Principal Rooney over time; yes, he’s a loser, but he’s also a civil servant, almost certainly underpaid, trying to do his job, and undermined by a privileged teenage punk. And, as Scalzi alludes to in a comment, Jeffrey Jones, who played Principal Rooney, is a registered sex offender, which colors my view of Principal Rooney and his other roles. Notwithstanding Jones’s personal choices, he’s a talented character actor.

Principal Vernon, on the other hand, is a petty little bully. No sympathy. What kind of loser threatens a high school kid with, “You mess with the bull, you get the horns?” On the other hand, Paul Gleason, the talented character actor who played Vernon, seems to have been an all right guy, who praised his teenaged “Breakfast Club” costars.

Look, I’m not trying to say that new technologies never raise gnarly new legal questions, but what I am saying is that a lot of the time, the “new legal challenges” raised by technology are somewhere between 95-100% bullshit, ginned up by none-too-bright tech bros and their investors, and then swallowed by regulators and lawmakers who are either so credulous they’d lose a game of peek-a-boo, or (likely) in on the scam.

— Federal Wallet Inspectors, by Cory Doctorow, @pluralistic@mamot.fr

John Varley died two days ago on December 10, 2025. A great many will mourn him as a science fiction writer whose work they enjoyed. But this misses his moment.

In the mid-1970s, Varley exploded into science fiction like a phoenix. His “Eight Worlds” stories were set in a future where hyper-powerful aliens have killed everyone on Earth as a threat to its whales and porpoises and humanity survives everywhere else in the Solar System. Despite this bleak background, the stories were bright and inventive. People change gender on a whim. Wealthy and glorious cities turn to shacks and hovels when their holographic fronts are turned off at night. People bank their memories so that, upon death, they can be restarted with new memories. He wrote so many major stories per year that, in a resurrection of an old pulp-days practice, some had to be published under a pseudonym.

We were all dazzled. His work was full of impressive new ideas. And, outside of the Eight Worlds sequence, he wrote things like “In the Hall of the Martian Kings,” which resurrected the possibility of intelligent life on Mars after the Mariner probes had apparently disproved that. Or “Air Raid,” which made air travel terrifying again.

His novel Titan looked to be the opening of a classic trilogy.

Briefly–for almost a decade–John Varley seemed to be the new Robert Heinlein.

And then, alas, he went to Hollywood.

— Flogging Babel: John Varley, 1947-2025

Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, contends that Americans and the English smile differently. On this side of the Atlantic, we simply draw the corners of our lips up, showing our upper teeth. Think Julia Roberts or the gracefully aged Robert Redford. “I think Tom Cruise has a terrific American smile,” Keltner, who specializes in the cultural meaning of emotions, says. In England, they draw the lips back as well as up, showing their lower teeth. The English smile can be mistaken for a suppressed grimace or a request to wipe that stupid smile off your face. Think headwaiter at a restaurant when your MasterCard seems tapped out, or Prince Charles anytime.

— National Smiles, The New York Times

Question for my micro.blog chums: How do you find old posts about a topic? Imagine you are a fan of the TV show “Severance,” and you write about it occasionally over a few years. One day you want to find all your “Severance” posts — how? Search?

Stop Hacklore is a website to help fight myths about digital security, with advice on using public WiFi (it isn’t dangerous), QR codes (also not dangerous — it’s essentally the same as clicking a link), changing passwords every 90 days (unnecessary — and can actually be dangerous) and more.

ME, WATCHING THE TRAILER OF “PLURIBUS:” “This looks dreadful. Pass.”
WATCHING EPISODES 1-3: “This is depressing and a little boring. In this show, the world has undergone a miraculous, wonderful and terrible transition and the show focuses on an unpleasant middle-aged woman day-drinking and binge-watching ‘Golden Girls.’ Why are we watching this?”
EPISODE FOUR: “Enjoying this now.”
EPISODES 6-7: “I LOVE THIS SHOW SO SO MUCH!!! CAROL IS AWSUM AND SO IS THE PARAGUAYAN GUY!!! I CAN’T STAND TO WAIT A WEEK FOR THE NEXT EPISODE!!!!”

But I do wish we could see more of the world the Plurbs are creating.

Visions of the Future Should Come With an Expiration Date. Charlie Jane Anders: “One thing that strikes me is weird about classic science fiction is how soon many of its predictions came false.”

I’m checking to see how Reddit and Tumblr embeds look on the blog and in the newsletter. They look good on the blog. We’ll see in the morning how they look in the newsletter.

Due to unforseen circumcisions
byu/Final-Ad-2033 inBoneAppleTea

The Articles of Interest podcast with Avery Trufelman is doing a series on U.S. military uniforms and gear, and its cross-influence with civlian style, mostly men’s. Most of the series focuses on the 20th and 21st centuries, but it reaches back to the 1700s and 1800s. Start here with Chapter 1: The American military uniform.

Military gear and civilian outdoor gear are closely linked, and in the late 1700s and 1800s, being a manly U.S. man meant going out and killing an animal, skinning it and making it into an outdoor suit yourself. That was the theory. In reailty, you’d hire a Native American woman to do that.

Marco Rubio orders the State Department to return to using the Times New Roman font because the previous official font, Calibri, is “wasteful DEIA.” This is a small step in the MAGA eugenics program. They don’t just hate brown people; they also want to eradicate anyone else they’ve decided is genetically inferior, such as disabled people — in this case, people with reading disabilities, who find sans serif fonts easier to read.

As humanoid robots enter the mainstream, security pros flag the risk of botnets on legs.

A woman in the UK who suffers from schizophrenia thought her refrigerator was trying to communicate with her and she hospitalized herself. Turns out the message was an ad for the TV show “Plur1bus.” The message read “WE’RE SORRY WE UPSET YOU CAROL,” in creepy black letters on a yellow background.

The schizophrenic woman is named Carol, which is also the name of the main character of “Pluribus.”

Even a person without mental illness would be alarmed if that person was named Carol and their refrigerator sent them a creepy message using their name. This was a bad decision for an ad.

UPDATE: The only evidence I’ve been able to find for this is a single Reddit post. I’m going to hypothesize that this is a hoax, unless I see some other evidence.

I finished drinking coffee a half hour ago at 5:30 PM. I’m sure I will not regret this at three in the morning.

When you watch movies or long TV episodes at home, do you break them up over a few nights?

Cities in Flight: James Blish’s Overlooked Classic. I love these books.

The AI bubble isn’t new — Karl Marx explained the mechanisms behind it nearly 150 years ago. The theory of “surplus capital” explains the AI bubble. When the inevitable crash comes, working people will suffer.

Tech billionaires have a dystopian goal of financializing the world. The rise of prediction markets are a big part of that, says Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day:

Last month, Tarek Mansour, the co-founder of Kalshi, gave the audience at the Citadel Securities conference a chilling glimpse of where this is all headed (if we let it). “The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion,” he said on stage to a crowd of poor souls who, I guess, think that sounds dope.

Mansour’s “financialize everything” line is, in many ways, a condensed version of something Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a podcast last spring. A comment I come back to often because I believe he accidentally stated the fundamental driving philosophy of Big Tech. A perfect, succinct, unfathomably embarrassing snapshot of how a bunch of very wealthy losers view themselves:

“There’s this stat that I always think is crazy. The average American has three friends, three people they consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it’s like 15 friends or something,” he told podcast host Dwarkesh Patel, while talking about the rise of AI companions. “I think that there are all these things that are better about physical connections when you can have them, but the reality is that people just don’t have the connection and they feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like.”

Researcher Paul Fairie, on X at the time, had an even tighter summary of Zuckerberg’s worldview, “The average American has three eggs, but has demand for 15. So here are 12 photographs of eggs. I am a business man.”

The “here are 12 photographs of eggs” philosophy is everywhere you look. Not just at AI companies, but every large tech service. All of these platforms have inserted themselves into the cracks of modern life and want you to pay them — with your time, data, or actual money — for a hollow digital imitation of something we used to get from the other human beings in our lives. Or as X user r0sylns wrote recently, “Groceries? Get em delivered. Books? Buy em on amazon. Fuck libraries and bookstores. Stop buying CDs, vinyls, and DVDs, it’s all on the cloud! Movie theaters? Obsolete. Subscribe to 10 different platforms instead! Stay inside. Be afraid of your neighbors. Work til you die.”

“Create a problem. Take credit for trying to fix the problem you created. I wonder if FIFA gives a medal for that?"

Why We’re Paywalling Our Family Christmas Card . On McSweeney’s. I would 100% subscribe.

Elon Musk’s Blue Tick scam. The EU fines X $140 million for its deception over blue checkmarks. By Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr

America has identified its greatest enemy: Western Europe

Cisco: ‘Infrastructure debt’ drags down AI deployments. My latest on Fierce Network.

Chris Arnade walks Surrey, England. “A nostalgic theme park of managed decline.”

‘Ice batteries’ could heat up data center cooling. Cooling is a bottleneck for next-gen data centers. Nostromo Energy says ice — literal frozen water — can be part of the solution. My latest on Fierce Network.

On a whim, I bought a Godzilla T-shirt from Facebook and now Facebook thinks I want to replace my entire wardrobe with Godzilla- and Kaiju-themed apparel.

Maybe I do.

“Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What We Can Do About It,” is a playful book about a very serious topic. In a breezy 352 pages, author Cory Doctorow looks at how monopolization concentrates power in the hands of the few, erodes the middle class and makes the live of poor people more miserable and precarious.

“Enshittification” is a word coined by Doctorow in late 2022 to describe how tech platforms like Facebook, Google and Amazon captured monopolies.

Step one of enshittification is making things great for users. Remember how wonderful it was to connect with friends and family when you first got on Facebook? How miraculous Google search seemed the first time you used it? How amazing it was to find just the product you were looking for when you first used Amazon, and have that product delivered quickly and conveniently?

Step two is when platforms start degrading the experience for users to benefit business customers. Facebook shoves more and more ads and clickbait into its algorithmic feed. Google piles on the ads and makes its search steadily worse so you you have to dig deeper for what you’re looking for, and look at more ads as you do. Amazon deemphasizes the products you want and instead shows you search results for merchants who have paid to play.

The third and final stage of enshittification is when platforms make everybody miserable — both users and business customers — to benefit themselves and shareholders. Even many of the people who’d prefer to never use Facebook stay on because their kids' schools or medical support groups are there. Advertisers on Facebook and Google get steadily worsening returns on their investments but stay on because that’s where their customers are. Similar, both users and merchants are dissatisfied with Amazon, but neither group leaves because they’re stuck with each other.

I should pause here for a disclaimer: Cory and I are friends and I’ve been a fan of his writing and work since even before he even turned pro — since he was a precocious teen-ager and he and I both used the same online communities around 1990. But if you don’t believe me about how good “Enshittification” is, you can find plenty of other positive reviews online.

How it happened and why it matters

Over the course of the book, Cory documents how big platforms resort to fraud and regulatory capture to maintain their monopolies. He describes how enshittification is not just inconvenient — it erodes the incomes and working conditions of working people. And it’s not limited to the Internet. Amazon warehouse workers toil in sweltering temperatures and suffer high rates of injury, while delivery drivers pee in bottles because their brutal delivery schedules don’t give them time for bathroom breaks. Uber algorithms keep driver pay low. Nurses are forced to bid on work, competing with each other to drive their wages ever lower and lower, while the software that manages the bidding also monitors nurses' credit scores, to take advantage of nurses who are desperate because they have high debt.

Monopoly concentration enables fascism. The U.S. realized after World War II that German monopolies enabled the Nazis, and that realization helped drive anti-monopoly regulation that American Presidents beginning with Carter have torn down. The marriage of monopoly with fascism continues as American CEOs kiss Trump’s ring and donate lavishly to fund the White House Epstein ballroom.

About the word “enshittification” — yes it’s vulgar, and even silly. But that makes it more powerful. It’s a little naughty and fun to say, and it ties together social movements that otherwise wouldn’t have anything in common. Those sorts of alliances have historical precedent: Doctorow cites the example of the ecology movement taking off when people who cared about the ozone layer and owls realized they were in the same fight. And anti-enshittification, like ecology, can bring together unlikely allies — the Environmental Protection Agency was founded, not under Kennedy or Johnson or another Democrat, but under Richard Nixon.

The book ends hopefully. Enshittification can be stopped by tearing down the regulatory protections that prop it up. The Biden administration was an enthusiastic anti-enshittifier and the Trump administration has, surprisingly, shown the will to continue doing some of that. Trump is operating from corrupt motives — he will use monopoly regulation to punish his enemies while giving his allies a free pass — but good can flower from this bad seed. And Trump’s alienation of U.S. allies around the world encourages other countries to spin up industries competing with American monopolies, benefiting everyone — including Americans.

Get the book here: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

At a Cabinet meeting today, drunken Fox News host Pete Hegseth bragged about committing war crimes and lavishly praised convicted felon, sexual predator, pedophile and bribe-receiver Donald J. Trump, who rambled incoherently about the Epstein ballroom, bathroom tiles, the 2020 election and Biden.

Manton Reece @manton has some thoughts on Mastodon: Mastodon CEO change, 2026 reset

I’ve noted a drastic decline in activity in my Mastodon timeline. The people I follow just aren’t posting as much as they formerly did. I’ll sit and scroll the Mastodon timeline for a few minutes and discover to my surprise that I’ve scrolled back through 12 hours.

Of the three Twitterlike services, Bluesky and Threads are far more active for me.

On the other hand, I get far more activity on my posts on Mastodon than I do on Bluesky and Threads — more replies, likes and reblogs. I think it’s because at least two very popular Masto users follow me and occasionally boost my posts, which has helped me attract more followers there. I have 1,100 Mastodon followers, compared with 677 on Bluesky and 285 on Threads.

However, I get most of the activity on my posts on Facebook, with Tumblr a solid second place. Masto is third, Bluesky and Threads a distant fourth and fifth and mitchwagner.com gets hardly any activity at all, and I do it because I just like blogging.

I really want Mastodon to succeed. I like the philosophy, and I like that the platform permits posts of any length (if you choose an instance configured that way). I can’t stand being locked into a 300- or 500-character box.

I hope new management breathes new life into Mastodon. As Cory Doctorow points out, the reason that Bluesky and Threads take off isn’t because proprietary platforms are inherently superior to open source — it’s because those two platforms have much more money than Mastodon does.

It frustrates me that Mastodon and Bluesky insist on being separate silos. They need to get it together and become one thing. Arguing over AT protocol vs. ActivityPub is foolish.

A recent interview with political activist Srđa Popović, a leader of the movement that overthrew Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević in 2000, is heartening to anybody who fears civil war in the U.S.

And the threat is real. The Trump government deploys ICE raids against peaceful U.S. residents and citizens. It deploys the military against people it claims, without evidence, are narcoterrorists. Trump supporters staged an unsuccessful violent insurrection against Congress Jan. 6, 2021. A large minority of young Republican political staffers in Washington D.C. express Nazi views.

American citizens are getting fed up — what happens when they fight back?

I’m not quite old enough to remember the riots in U.S. cities in the 1960s, and hundreds of domestic terrorist bombings in the 1970s. Of course I do remember the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

To be clear, I am not advocating violent resistance. I fear it, both for myself and for the country I love. Violence inevitably creates suffering and misery.

Forunately, Popović spells out another solution, how tyrants can be deposed without resorting to violence. Indeed, nonviolent revolutions are more effective than their bloody alternatives, Popović said.

Research at Harvard confirms the greater effectiveness of nonviolent resistance compared with violence.

Popović appeared on the Revolution.social podcast, hosted by Rabble, aka Evan Henshaw-Plath, Twitter’s first employee. Watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

“Leaders need to figure out that democracy is like love,” Popović said. “You need to make it every day. This is not something that is given to you [that should be taken] for granted. You need to participate daily in keeping your governments accountable, from the level of President to the level of the school.”

After Milošević’s fall, Popović briefly pursued a career in Serbian politics, and then established the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) in 2003. “CANVAS has worked with pro-democracy activists from more than 50 countries, promoting the use of non-violent resistance in achieving political and social goals,” according to Wikipedia. In 2015, he co-authored: “Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Non-Violent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World."

The revolution against Milošević’s operated in the late 1990s, the era before social media, when revolutionary social movements communicated by putting up fliers, going on the radio, setting up pirate radio stations and organizing in the streets, like Tahrir Square in Egypt and Occupy Wall Street. But since then Popović has studied how to use social media and other modern tools to facilitate movements.

Popović’s expertise isn’t limited to revolutions. He discusses tools to facilitate any kind of social change — preserving democracy, open societies and resisting the rise of authoritarianism.

Popović’s origin story

Speaking slowly in a beautiful baritone, with a delightful Central European accent, Popović gives his personal history, and the recent history of Serbia. He said he grew up in “a beautiful country called Yugoslavia,” which later split into six countries in a civil war, including Serbia.

Popović has a dry, deadpan sense of humor. He delivers jokes matter-of-factly.

“At the age of 17, I thought the activism is for old ladies fighting for the dog’s rights, or something very exotic.” Instead, he studied biology and played bass guitar in a rock band he describes as “the pathetic version of Sisters of Mercy.”

He became an accidental activist, like most of the people he has met during his activist career.

Milošević came to power in 1989 and wrecked the country, bringing 100% hyperinflation in a single day. Popović joined a resistance movement that eventually led to Milošević’s ouster.

The revolution is chronicled in a documentary, “Bringing Down a Dictator," available for free in 36 languages, courtesy of a wealthy benefactor.

How do nonviolent social movements succeed?

Situations everywhere are different. Fighting a corrupt school board in Nashville, Tennessee, is different from fighting the Iranian regime. but the principles and tools are very similar, Popović said.

First, movements need a plan, a vision for not just overthrowing the dictator but how to establish democracy. Otherwise, you end up like Egypt, which successfully ousted Hosni Mubarak, who was replaced by an even more repressive government, Popović said.

“You need to know what you want first. Instead of just being pissed off with how the situation is, you need to formulate the change, which is called the vision of tomorrow,” Popović said.

Vision is where the Democratic Party today falls short. When the day comes that we oust the Republican Party from national dominance and Democrats control all three branches of government … then what? Do we just put the corporate Democrats back in power and roll things back to where they were in 2024? Do we institute universal healthcare, free public education, a national minimum wage, a jobs guarantee and robust industrial policy? Being anti-Trump is necessary for victory, but it’s nowhere near enough.

Additionally, you need a strategy for staying nonviolent.

“Nonviolent discipline is one of the of the key elements of success of these movements. Nonviolent movements are twice more likely, historically, to succeed than those that are throwing molotovs,” Popović said.

Successful movements need unity between different groups. “That very often means talking to the people you disagree with,” Popović said. Successful movements were unlikely coalitions of weird partners, The suffragette movement, which won women the right to vote in the U.S., included radical feminists, but also conservative church women who were trying to stop their husbands from drinking,

“They had this weird coalition between conservative churches and liberal woman that decided together they had a mutual interest that gave them the vote,” Popović said.

Polish liberation from the Soviet Union was led by blue-collar shipyard workers, allied with urban intelligentsia and the Roman Catholic Church — not really the kinds of people you’d expect to have beers together, Popović said.

“The key here is, if you want to be successful, you need to move into [the] mainstream. Take a look at the environmental movement. It started as a bunch of hippies tying themselves to the fences of military bases in [the] 60s. It ended up with the Environmental Protection Agency,” Popović said.

He added, “Like football — which Americans wrongly call ‘soccer’ — you want to control the middle field.”

Social media is not enough

That’s where social media comes in, because people spend a lot of time online. But it’s only “the tip of the iceberg,” Popović said.

Social media have made political movements today different from decades past. Today, they coalesce around trigger events, like the death of George Floyd, Popović said.

Movements need to win support from institutions — which Popović calls “pillars.” The Martin Luther King Jr.-led bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, worked because it cost bus companies money. Black people were far more likely to ride buses than whites — bus companies depended on their business. Pressuring politicians failed to defeat segregation because racist politicians knew they could continue to get elected. Pressuring business worked because racist business owners cared more about making money than about white supremacy.

“You don’t have to convince the business community or the bus owners that they should no longer believe in segregation. You just have to make the cost of segregation higher than the cost of keeping it going,” Popović said.

Social movements need to focus on issues that voters care about. Harvey Milk was a San Francisco politician who was a pioneering hero for gay and lesbian rights — but he didn’t run for office on those issues; he ran by looking respectable and promising to stop people leaving dog poop on the ground. Because nobody wants to step in dog poop, no matter what their sexual orientation or political beliefs.

“He didn’t abandon his queerness or anything else, no — but he figured out what the leverage points were,” Popović said.

Getting security forces onboard

Getting support from the police and military is another important step. “One of the final things that happens is that when a regime collapses, the police and military say, ‘I’m not going to do this anymore,'” The Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria was one of the most powerful regimes in the world and it collapsed abruptly, because the police just stopped believing.

Today’s autocratic regimes succeed by making people apathetic, atomizing people, and persuading people there is nothing worth fighting for. Vladimir Putin doesn’t convince people that Russia is a paradise, he just needs to persuade people that democracy doesn’t work and democracies are just as bad as Russia and everything is controlled by conspiracies and the Deep State, Popović said.

Intriguingly, Popović is an advocate of Bitcoin, cryptocurrency and blockchain. I need to think more about that — until now, I have thought of Bitcioon and crypto as a massive scam, useful only for financial speculation, bribery and crime. But Popović points out that crypto can be effective in circumventing authoritarian control of financial institutions, which control is used to stifle opposition movements by depriving them of funds and access to banking. Bitcoin moves money into Burma and exile societies in Thailand, he said, also noting the potential of open sources and blockchain to ensure free and fair elections.

Popović, who now lives in Colorado, talks about how democracy and social change applies to local movements, like schools and roads.

Humor is a powerful tool for social change.

Humor comes naturally to Serbs, Popović said. For example, when Serbia was obsessed wth a solar eclipse, the resistance there built a giant cardboard telescope that it carried through the streets, and when you looked in the end you saw a picture of Milošević’s head as a falling star.

The telescope “was four meters long, it was hell to carry and it was looking like it was made by an 11-year-old,” Popović said. But hundreds of people lined up to look through the telescope, and the stunt attracted coverage from international news media. “It’s so photogenic, and if you’re a journalist, this is what you want,” Popović said.

In another act of civil disobedience, an artist built a barrel with Milošević’s face on it, and they put it in the main shopping district, and let passers-by deposit coins to get baseball bats to hit the barrel. Within fifteen minutes, 200 people lined up with their shopping bags to play the game. Police got the order to stop it, but there wasn’t anything to do other than arrest shoppers.

Popović calls this “dilemna activism,” becasuse it puts the regime in a dilemma. If they let the activism go, they look weak, and if they crack down, they look stupid. And cracking down on comic protests deflates police morale; they signed up to protect and serve, not to arrest shoppers whacking at a barrel with a baseball bat like at a carnival game.

“Humor breaks fear,” and it also breaks apathy, Popović said.

For more on the power of humor to defeat dictators, Popović recommends a free book, “Pranksters vs. Autocrats”

And finally, resistance movements need to look cool.

“The last thing: one of the reasons when movements become successful is when they become cool. Everybody wants to be around the cool people. Everybody wants to be part of something cool. What’s more cool than using humor?” Popović said.

My colleague Monica Alleven landed an interview with Justen Burdette, the embattled CEO of Hawaiian mobile operator Mobi. He disputes charges that he fled the United States to Brazil. He is, in fact, in Canada, where he has previously lived, he told Monica.

A fun article about “mansplaining” and other neologisms. Not to be taken too seriously.

The EU’s top Meta regulator is “contractually prohibited from hurting Meta’s feelings." She signed a nondisparagement clause prohibiting her from saying bad things about Meta — prohibiting her from doing her new job — and she has piles of Meta stock options. By Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr

If we were rich, I’d absolutely buy this beautiful real-time New York subway clock, so I’d have precise knowledge of the schedule of a transit system 3,900 miles from our house. (Thanks, @pluralistic@mamot.fr.)

Neal Stephenson has a newsletter. Great! (And thanks, @pluralistic@mamot.fr for linking to it.)

It doesn’t look good for Hawaiian mobile network operator Mobi. Customers are complaining on Reddit that they’ve been disconnected and stranded, and CEO Justen Burdette reportedly flew the coop for Brazil. A lawsuit filed against Burdette alleges that he didn’t pay $1 million in employee wages, among other things. My colleague Monica Alleven reports on Fierce Network.

Cisco reports a rebound in service provider spending driven by network refreshes and growing demand for AI and data center connectivity. My latest on Fierce Network.

The Trump administration is replacing American democracy with a kleptocracy, a system of corruption in which a network of ruling elites use the institutions of government to steal public assets for their own private gain….

It is the system Russia’s president Vladimir Putin exploits in Russia, and President Donald J. Trump is working to establish it in the United States of America.

“The Trumps’ most natural allies,” [writes Tom Burgis of The Guardian], “first in business, now also in politics—have long been the rulers of the Gulf’s petro-monarchies, who see no distinction between their states’ interests and their families.'”

— Heather Cox Richardson:

Current examples of Trump kleptocracy: Trump’s plan to ally with Russia and force Ukraine to surrender, funneling billions of dollars of Russian natural resources and sweetheart deals to favored Russian and U.S. businessmen; White House advisor David Sacks negotiating sweetheart deals for Silicon Valley companies; U.S. policies promoting Trump family business; the sale of public office to Trump donors.

Also, Trump commuted the sentence of David Gentile, convicted of defrauding 10,000 investors out of $1.6 billion. “According to Kenneth P. Vogel of the New York Times, prosecutors said the victims were small business owners, teachers, nurses, farmers, and veterans: ‘hardworking, everyday people.’ ‘I lost my whole life savings,” one victim wrote about his losses. “I am living from check to check.'”

There’s a new name for the new oligarchs: The Epstein Class. Trump used to call those people “the swamp” and now he is their champion.

I changed the domain for this blog. The old domain redirects to the new domain so if you’re following this blog you don’t have to make any changes to your bookmarks, RSS feeds or email.

I started this blog using the domain mitchw.blog in late 2022, when I switched from Wordpress to Micro.blog. I didn’t want to use my full name on social media because at that time I was working for a company that was sensitive about being associated with potentially offensive speech. “Mitch” and “Wagner” were already taken on .com and .net and all other reasonable top-level domains, and I couldn’t think of anything cute that I liked, so I went with MitchW. I used the .blog top-level-domain because I was swept up in the fervor for the revival of good old-fashioned blogging.

I quickly got tired of that domain, but couldn’t be bothered to change it. I couldn’t think of anything I liked better. And I couldn’t even figure out why I didn’t like the domain mitchw.blog.

I had an insight recently, from a throwaway comment John Gruber made on his podcast The Talk Show (I think it was this episode with Stephen Robles): He said he doesn’t like the word “blog.” And I realized I don’t like the word either. I love blogging, but I don’t like the word “blog.”

Also, I don’t ever think of myself as “MitchW.” I think of myself as Mitch, Mitch Wagner and could even go with a Wagner domain name if it was available (which is was not).

I already owned mitchwagner.com, so I changed the blog domain to that. I followed these instructions. In my case, I already had a website hosted at that domain at Micro.blog, and so I didn’t have to mess with DNS settings; I just had to follow the instructions at the preceding link to point the domain to my blog instead of to my other website.

The whole thing took just a few minutes and was no trouble at all.

In addition to the blog, I had used mitchw.blog as my handle on Bluesky. I changed that to mitchwagner as well. This broke all the links to my previous Bluesky posts, but I don’t care about that.

Then I changed my ActivityPub username to @mitch@mitchwagner.com. Now, I can better take advantage of a feature of Micro.blog where I can read and reply to Mastodon and Bluesky responses from the Micro.blog timeline; people on both those services will see responses as coming from names extremely similar to the ones I use on those respective services (though not identical, they’re close enough).

And speaking of domain names: Twenty-some years ago, I saw a woman named Micki Krimmel used the blog domain mickipedia.com. As soon as I saw, I thought, “That’s brilliant!” And “Damnit! I wish I’d thought of that!” I didn’t follow her lead and use the name Mitchipedia because it would seem like stealing. Finally, two years ago, I thought, “Why don’t I just ask her if she has a problem with it?” And she was gracious about the whole thing and I changed my tumblr handle to mitchipedia but stopped short of using it as my primary blog domain because it seemed like too much of a commitment, like getting a tattoo (something else I once decided to do but then decided against it at the last minute and still have not followed through on). Also, the .com and .net domains were already taken and I grabbed .org but I feel like I’m not a .org. Yes, I overthink this kind of thing.

After comparison shopping, I now know that the best place to buy ice in the neighborhood is the liquor store a quarter mile from the house. Hopefully, our refrigerator will be repaired or replaced before I get a chance to form a relationship with the people who work there.

We are watching Pluribus. The premise is that everyone on earth has undergone a rapid, miraculous change in consciousness, and the show focuses on a single unpleasant, bitter alcoholic who was left behind. We are not exactly enjoying the show and yet we feel compelled to continue watching.

I really want to see what kind of world the transformed human race creates but instead we’re locked in on watching someone get drunk and binge-watch “Golden Girls.” That is literally what happens in the third episode. 🍿

Hamilton Nolan: Third parties on the U.S. national level are disastrous: “On the national level, and in particular concerning presidential elections, forming a third party tends to be counterproductive, because it has the effect of pulling votes away from the party closest to your beliefs and thereby helping the party most opposed to your own beliefs.” But a Labor Party can strike a crippling blow against Republicans in Red States that hate Democrats. How to Win Red States With a Labor Party

Michelin Honored the Cheesesteak. Not All Philadelphians Cheered. “In a Venn diagram of people deeply concerned about Michelin ratings and people deeply concerned about cheesesteaks, the overlap is not large.”

Why sex workers, kids and terrorists are the first to adopt new tech. “… these groups aren’t more (or less) temperamentally inclined to throw themselves into mastering new technologies. Rather, they have more reason to do so.” — Normie diffusion and technophilia, Cory Doctorow, @pluralistic@mamot.fr

Heather Cox Richardson: The Trump government surrenders to the Russians, betrays our European allies, commits war crimes and Trump posts messages of hate and terror for Thanksgiving.

As Trump’s popularity continues to drop, the MAGA coalition shows signs of cracking, and Trump’s mental acuity slips, there is a frantic feel to the administration, as if Trump’s people are trying to grab all they can, while they can.

Joel Stein defends the em-dash in the face of attacks by AI-haters. “It’s the breath marks of Emily Dickinson, the stream of consciousness of Virginia Woolf, the head-clogging maximalism of David Foster Wallace, the self-aggrandizing asides of Joel Stein.”

We Can’t Diet and Exercise Our Way Out of the Next Pandemic. ““In the event of a sudden pandemic, what should we do? This month, Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health, offered a remarkably blunt answer: nothing.” By David Wallace-Wells.

Our refrigerator is currently not keeping things cold. We have the refrigerator repair guy coming Monday, but there is the possibility it’s not just pining for the fjords and we now have an ex-refrigerator. If we need to replace the fridge, do you have a recommendation?

I’d like to see a good miniseries based on Roger Zelazny’s “Damnation Alley,” but I fear that the biker aesthetic might be seen as out-of-date. BIkers don’t have the same pop culture romance as they did in the 50s-80s. And people would think the show was a ripoff of “Escape From New York,” so the publicists would have to explain that the Zelazny came first.

There was a movie made of the story in the late 1970s, but it got terrible reviews and I have never seen it. The armored car in the movie lived on for years in a series of 1980s Amoco commercials.

I’d also like to see a miniseries based on Zelazny’s “Doorways in the Sand,” and of course a full-blown big-budget many-season series based on the “Chronicles of Amber.”

I’ve seen reports that George R.R. Martin is producing a series based on Zelazny’s “Roadmarks.” I’d love to see that, but I haven’t seen anything about it recently and I suspect it’s in limbo.

kthxbai

I thought this was a pretty cool show. I liked the idea of a sentient chimp as crew member, and I had a mad crush on the girl.

A look back at “Mallrats” on its 30th anniversary, including a big interview with Kevin Smith. By Katie Baker at The Ringer

“Mallrats” was Smith’s second movie, coming off “Clerks,” a low-budget indy which saw him hailed as a cinematic genius. “Mallrats” was a spectacular flop, and critics were now saying Smith was an idiot.

But “Mallrats” has lived on as a cult classic and fan favorite, and making the movie shaped both Smith’s career and his life. He met his wife, Jennifer Schwalbach-Smith, through a circuitous route as a result of making “Mallrats,” so (as he points out) their daughter owes her life to “Mallrats.”

Smith tells a story about how he had to flee his house during the recent Los Angeles wildfires:

Smith considers himself “a pack rat and a fuckin’ hoarder,” but on that day, he was holding only two things when he left the house with his wife and their dogs. The first was a small urn containing a portion of his father’s ashes.

“The other,” Smith says, “was my Silent Bob costume. Because I was like, Well, if everything burns down, I’m gonna have to work and shit.”

I wouldn’t say “Mallrats” is one of my favorite movies, but I have seen it two or three times and enjoyed it and — you know what? There aren’t many movies I’ve seen more than once so yeah I guess “Mallrats” is one of my favorite movies. I know the movie is loved by middle-schoolers, but if you’re reading this you’ve seen my posts and you know that a big piece of my sense of humor is stuck at age 13.

China has brought millions out of poverty. The US has not – by choice

Jamelle Bouie: The White House Gold Rush Is On. “If Trump’s first term was marked by a level of graft and self-dealing that would have embarrassed a Tammany stalwart, then his second term seems to be an explicit effort to outpace his previous record and set a new high-water mark for political corruption in the United States…. By any and every measure, in other words, Trump is the most corrupt person to ever sit in the Oval Office.”

America is becoming Dallas. Hamilton Nolan visits a megachurch. “Could we not have the love without the accompanying hate? The community, without the accompanying need to make our community an army ready to destroy all others?

“Kumbaya” is a pretty bad folk song but it does not deserve the abuse it’s taken.

We’re going to war with Venezuela for the same reasons we went to war with Iraq. Oil, the president is legit a bad man, and handwaving about terrorism. We risk the same outcome.

A main argument of Trump’s 2015 Presidential campaign, which helped get him elected, that the Iraq war was a stupid, bipartisan blunder. And he was right! It left us with a mess that we didn’t clean up for nearly 20 years. We’re still paying hundreds of billions of dollars per year for that fiasco. And yet Trump, the stupidest and most incompetent man who ever occupied the White House, says, “That was great! Let’s do it again!”

An ancient Roman epitaph for a dog.

I continued reading “Lord of the Rings” last night. Frodo and his hobbit scooby-gang have left Bree. We’re getting a lot more description of landscape and also talk of the Black Riders. That name did not age well. Strider recited an interminably long poem about an elf woman and human man who fell in love. She was immortal and she died. I think. I didn’t follow what I was reading too well; I was falling asleep by then. I started thinking that Carl Hiaasen had a new book out a few months ago and I would really like to read that. Then I decided to call it a night on LoTR and read something else, but I was too tired for that so we just watched a little TV and went to bed.

Karoline Leavitt says Trump calling a woman reporter “piggy” is an example of him being “respectful” and journalists should appreciate that.

I’m sure that she and her boss, the sexual predator, pedophile and convicted criminal Donald J. Trump, will find it respectful when I say that they’re despicable idiots and that they will appreciate it.

I recently resolved to stop keeping empty boxes and to throw out the empty boxes that I already have.

But today I received shoes from Zappos — a box inside a box — and those boxes are too good to throw out. Sturdy, clean, regular and the perfect size for … something. I’ll figure it out.

Today in America’s rapid decline: Trump is literally threatening death to lawmakers who reminded serving military of their obligation to disobey unlawful orders. These lawmakers are themselves military veterans — Trump had a medical deferrment because, he claims, he had bonespurs.

The CDC changed its website to include lies about alleged vaccine dangers.

And the U.S. Coast Guard will no longer classify swastikas and nooses as hate symbols.

Amazon Prime is making a new Stargate series! Sweet!

Trump Praises Saudi Prince and Dismisses Question About Killing of Journalist

“You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that,” Mr. Trump told the journalist, Mary Bruce of ABC News, later referring to her query as “a horrible, insubordinate, and just a terrible question.”

KBS must have been uncomfortable about Mary Bruce’s question. You know who else was uncomfortable? Jamal Khashoggi, as he was being murdered and dismembered by Saudi agents.

Town’s Huge Christmas Mural Was Generated Using AI, Resulting in Ghastly Chthonic Horrors. “This mural has gone up in Kingston, ostensibly for Christmas but AI has ensured it’s actually to celebrate the return of our dark lord Cthulhu."

A 79-year-old man who was born in a refugee camp is doing hard time in Alligator Alcatraz after 70 years in the U.S. “He fell out of his wheelchair and they left him on the cell floor for hours.”

Here’s another photo of the borzoi dog I saw at the park the other day, caught in the act of shaking himself.

OpenAI is cutting off service to a toymaker after teddy bears started telling children how to play with matches and talking about sexual fetishes. Why didn’t I ever have cool toys like that when I was a kid?

Suddenly Frodo noticed that a strange-looking weather-beaten man, sitting in the shadows near the wall, was also listening intently to the hobbit-talk. He had a tall tankard in front of him, and was smoking a long-stemmed pipe curiously carved. His legs were stretched out before him, showing high boots of supple leather that fitted him well, but had seen much wear and were now caked with mud. A travel-stained cloak of heavy dark-green cloth was drawn close about him, and in spite of the heat of the room he wore a hood that overshadowed his face; but the gleam of his eyes could be seen as he watched the hobbits.

Here’s Strider. He is the coolest man in the Prancing Pony — faded Levi’s, biker boots and leather jacket, smoking unfiltered Camels. He is wearing aviator sunglasses inside the dark bar; on anybody else they’d look affected and silly but on him they make him look even cooler. He is played by 1980s Sam Elliott.

Also: I can’t get over that there’s a guy in Middle Earth named “Bob.”

Her name is “hippie,” and she was being walked by a lovely white-haired Russian woman with an accent straight out of a 1970s spy movie. Hippie came right up to me and stuck her nose on the treat pouch on my hip; the Russian woman explained that Hippie is NOT allowed to take treats from other people because Hippie is bred to run and she takes the dog to the off-leash dog beach and if the dog were allowed to accept treats from other people the dog would not run; the dog would just go from person to person begging dog treats.

Hippie stood about 3-1/2 feet high, with a skinny body, long legs and a long, thin snout.

The breed has an interesting history.

They were formerly known as Russian wolfhounds and the name describes their history — they were bred in 16th Century Russia to hunt wolves. For centuries, they could not be purchased but only given as gifts from the tsar, with whom the breed was popular.

The hobbits have arrived at the Prancing Pony, which I picture as like the Bada Bing in The Sopranos. “Paulie Walnuts” could be a hobbit name.