Mitch's Blog

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 19:45:50 -0700

Yes, I am once again migrating my fedi followers and the folks I am following from micro.blog to Mastodon. Please be sure your seatbacks are vertical and your trays are upright and in the locked position.

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 13:36:29 -0700

Here’s something I saw while walking the dog one day in early March. The sticker in the back window says, “I identify as fully restored.”

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 11:00:58 -0700

Cory Doctorow reviews “Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed," by Quinn Slobodian Ben Tarnoff, about “the ideology that gave rise to Elon Musk, the social forces that gave rise to that ideology, and the terrible future that ideology seeks to bring about.”

“It’s a chilling vision, a Torment Nexus dystopia run by someone who thinks cyberpunk was a suggestion, not a warning.”

Musk hails from apartheid South Africa, where a dictatorship resulted in luxury for the white minority, brutal dictatorship for the Black minority, fascist control over speech for all, and a “meat-grinder draft that saw young men of Musk’s age being called up to suppress liberation uprisings.” Musk’s grandfather was “a grandiose and vicious white supremacist who moved to South Africa from Canada because of his love for apartheid and racial hierarchy” and his father was “a violent and abusive fool.”

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 09:54:48 -0700

When spammers are needy.

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 09:01:41 -0700

Donald Trump makes Tim Cook’s resignation all about Donald Trump. “I was very impressed with myself to have the head of Apple calling to ‘kiss my ass.’”

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 08:44:51 -0700

Tucker Carlson apologizes for the role he played in getting Trump elected. “I’ll be tormented by it for a long time.”

Paraphrasing Elmore Leonard: Wonderful things can happen when seeds of discord are planted in a garden of assholes.

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 08:40:29 -0700

Heather Cox Richardson’s most recent newsletter is a parade of Trump greatest hits.

Trump has called public attention to his ballroom about a third of the days this year, more frequently than he’s talked about healthcare insurance or affordability. And the focus on the ballroom increases as the year progresses.

Regarding the Iran war, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted: “We are spending billions to keep our entire navy in the Strait to fecklessly fail to open a waterway that wasn’t closed until Trump’s pointless war of choice closed it. He’s just burning your tax money.”

Evidence of insider trading over Trump’s war announcements, with “a consistent pattern of spikes” in market activity “just hours, or sometimes minutes, before a social media post or media interview was made public.” And there’s a similar pattern of insider trading over Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement a year ago.

A Saudi sovereign wealth fund invested $2 billion in Jared Kushner’s private equity firm. Sen. Jon Osoff (D-GA) said Kushner is “on the Saudi payroll for $2 billion…. And now he’s leading American diplomacy in the Middle East…. The rules are for us, not for them.”

Meanwhile, the other Trump boys and Whiskey Pete Hegseth are getting rich selling weapons for the war. “I tell you what, never before have we seen so little effort to hide so much corruption. The Mar-a-Lago Mafia has taken American corruption to spectacular new heights,” Osoff said.

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 08:20:07 -0700

I haven’t been closely following Katie Porter’s campaign, or the California Gubernatorial race in general. None of her behavior outlined in this Washington Post article seems very bad — it’s merely rude. I suspect she’s being held to a different standard because she is a woman. For a man, her behavior would be seen by many voters as strength.

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 19:02:16 -0700

One of the many spots that FBI Director Kash Patel liked to get hammered is an exclusive club in Las Vegas called the Poodle Room.

The Poodle Room is associated with the Fontainebleau Hotel, and I walked past the discreet entrance in the lobby. when I stayed there last month.

Unfortunately, the Poodle Room is not a place where there are lots of poodles and you can play with them.

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 18:51:44 -0700

Excellent headline at The Register: World’s blandest man steps down from CEO job to spend more time in tastefully appointed home. And a good article under the headline, by Matt Rosoff.

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 13:11:44 -0700

Palantir issued an ominous, 22-point corporate manifesto. “… reads like the ramblings of a comic-book villain.

Hamilton Nolan: “This is not a coherent set of arguments at all. It is not a philosophy. It is not a set of intelligible ethics. Rather, it is a list of angry reactions to being yelled at—given a somber voice and dressed up as some sort of wondrous work of intellect.”

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 13:10:53 -0700

The Onion’s takeover of Alex Jones’ Infowars is nearly complete.

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 13:10:30 -0700

NASA turned off more instruments on Voyager 1 to keep it going. The spacecraft launched in 1977. An American triumph, for all humanity.

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 13:09:04 -0700

Comrade Trump: Burning down the American empire to save it. By Cory Doctorow. Trump’s bonehead maneuvers are driving the world toward solar power, away from dependence on American technology companies and putting spine into the Democratic Party. “Look, all things being equal, I would have preferred that Trump had keeled over from a mid-burger stroke on the campaign trail in 2016. But when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. This is a deeply shitty timeline, but Comrade Trump keeps tripping over his red tie. Let’s take the wins.”

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 09:55:57 -0700

Here’s a nice view I saw while walking the dog one morning a few weeks ago.

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 08:21:53 -0700

Heather Cox Richardson: “And, just like that, President Donald J. Trump’s triumphant boasting that the Strait of Hormuz had been permanently reopened has unraveled in less than 24 hours.” Read to the end for a moving speech by Pete Buttigieg.

🔗Link list 4.18.2026

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 21:56:32 -0700

Voting machines are terrible but not like Trump and MAGA say they are. “… if you’ve conditioned yourself to reflexively dismiss voting machine criticisms as conspiratorial nonsense, then you are part of the problem.” — Cory Doctorow

The Film That Explains Contemporary America — The Sorrow and the Pity has lessons for how authoritarianism takes root—and how to fight against it. By David A. Graham at The Atlantic

Heather Cox Richardson: “On the evening of April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln and First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln went to Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., to see a production of the comedy Our American Cousin. The Lincolns had spent the afternoon taking a carriage ride together and discussing the future, including the travel they hoped for, to Europe and to California to see the Pacific Ocean.

“One of the last men to speak with the president before he left for the theater said it seemed the cares of the previous four years were melting away. The Confederacy was all but defeated, and the nation seemed to be on its way to a prosperous, inclusive new future.”

With Lincoln dead and Andrew Johnson as their champion, Confederate leaders and their successors for more than 160 years have worked to undo their defeat. Confederate apologists rebranded their cause as a Southern war for individual liberty over Northern tyranny, rather than being fought to preserve slavery, which is what the Confederates themselves said it was as the war was being fought. Donald Trump is their latest champion.

Heather Cox Richardson updates on the state of the Iran war as of Friday evening (already out of date). Also, the Atlantic investigates FBI director Kash Patel and finds him to be “a poor manager who is terrified he is going to lose his job and whose overuse of alcohol, tendency to disappear, and purges of FBI agents who had investigated Trump endangers our national security…. Patel has kept his job thanks to his willingness to use the FBI to target Trump’s perceived enemies, but his focus on things like whether FBI merchandise looks ‘fierce’ has made officials think ‘we don’t have a real functioning FBI director.’” And Trump is negotiating with the IRS to settle a $10 billion lawsuit he filed against it — as both plaintiff and President, Trump is negotiating both sides of the deal.

🔗 Link list 4.15.2026

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:00:09 -0700

It’s Time for Americans to Start Talking About “Soft Secession.” Christopher Armitage: “States don’t have to actively resist. They can simply refuse to help. And without state cooperation, much of the federal government’s agenda becomes unenforceable." From August 2025, still current. I suspect there is a lot of this going on already, quietly.

For some people, music doesn’t connect with any of the brain’s reward circuits. By Jacek Krywko on Ars Technica. I suspect this describes me. I almost never listen to music.

Did people memorize numbers before mobile phones?On Reddit. I remember four phone numbers: My own, current mobile phone number. The phone number we had for most of my childhood. My parents' phone number when they moved to a new place after I grew up. And the phone number I had when I was age 4 to 6 years old, which I remember my mother drilling me on over and over because I came from the free range generation when I could wander around the neighborhood unsupervised and she wanted to be sure I had the phone number so I could tell a responsible adult if I got lost or in trouble and needed to call her to get home.

“If you’re ever worried about whether your writing is too self indulgent, I just want you to remember that Sharknado had 5 sequels.” Creators should bring Sharknado energy to their own work. Seriously.

“A slight guilty pleasure of mine is looking at the absolutely ridiculous advice some ‘How to be a masculine man’ videos are giving and then going into the comments to see the most performative shit going.”

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:05:44 -0700

I love the show “Rooster,” starring Steve Carrell as a novelist, but it has the flaw of all shows and movies about writers in that you never, ever see him writing. Only once do we see him reading a book. That’s not how writers are built. We are compulsive.

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 13:54:32 -0700

I can’t get over J.D. Vance correcting the Pope on Christian ethics. That’s some grandmaster-level mansplaining there, J.D.

Foods I ate when I was a child

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 11:03:26 -0700

Bagels and pizza were common when I grew up on Long Island in the very late 60s and early/mid 70s. That’s not surprising — it was a heavily Italian and Jewish immigrant neighborhood.

Chinese food was plentiful and easy to find too.

We considered ourselves connoisseurs of all three cuisines and had strong opinions.

Pita bread was common, and I thought it looked nifty — bread! with a pocket! But my parents gave me the idea that only Gentiles ate pita bread. I think my Mom just made that kind of thing up when she wanted to shut us up. I don’t blame her for that. As a Mom raising three Jewish boys, she had to learn to defend herself verbally.

I was 14 years old when I first had Mexican food. I saw characters on TV eating “tacos” and thought they looked tasty, and the characters seemed cosmopolitan. Jim Rockford had a taco shack he favored. The very first Mexican restaurant in our Long Island suburb opened when I was 14, and our Spanish teacher took us to lunch there on a field trip. We got combo plates: A taco, I guess an enchilada, and refried beans. All of us kids, mostly Jewish-American, Italian-American and Irish-American, pronounced the food gross, particularly the refried beans.

We had Taco Bell and Jack in the Box tacos when I was in college, and I loved those.

By the time I was in my 30s I loved Mexican food, particularly Mission burritos of the type you get in San Francisco and San Jose. Big and fat and loaded with guacamole and Spanish rice and stuff. But I’ll eat a hard taco or twelve and enjoy it if you invite me to. I don’t have Mexican food often, alas, because of the calories.

When I was a preteen, I got it into my head that chili sounded great, I think in part because Heinlein mentioned that Lazarus Long loved it. I first had chili when I was 16 years old on a family trip to California. I thought chili was fine. I still do like chili, but do not love it. I occasionally make a pot of chili, though I have not done so in years.

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 10:46:45 -0700

Elswehwere on the internet, a friend observed that his blog is “scattershot” and I think he wished his blog was more organized.

However, a scattershot blog is a perfectly reasonable kind of blog. I’m very, very old school when it comes to blogging. It’s a weblog – a log of things you saw on the web – and also an online diary, where you can publish any thought that you want to share with the world.

At some point in the 2010s I started hearing people saying that a blog post had to be a structured essay and I responded no no no no no. I mean, a blog can be comprised solely of structured essays but it can also be whatever you want it to be.

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 07:27:36 -0700

Cory Doctorow compares living in the present to early 2020, when Covid was approaching. It’s a throwaway comment in his blog post yesterday, and it has stayed with me since. Julie and I are fortunate enough to be spectators to the news — it does not touch us personally yet — but I can see in the headlines that something bad is coming, it’s going to hit hard and I don’t know what to do to prepare for it.

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 06:55:17 -0700

I learned yesterday about the death of Scot Finnie, my editor and friend. We worked together for a few years in the 2000s. He and I and Brad Shimmin launched blogging for CMP Media back when CMP was a big company in the trade press and blogging was new.

Scot was a good editor, good friend and championed my career. We shared a common interest in productivity tools and could nerd out about that kind of software for a while — for a few years, he ran a newsletter about Windows productivity, Scot’s Newsletter, and he and I switched to Mac at about the same time.

We only talked a couple of times in the 2010s, and I think not at all since Covid. I am sad to lose him.

🔗 Link list 4.14.2026

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 16:19:27 -0700

Trump’s incredible shrinking tent (Zachary Basu/Axios) — Trump is alienating nearly every group in the unlikely coalition that voted him into office, even white voters without college degrees. “A new CBS News/YouGov poll found Trump’s approval among white voters without college degrees — the backbone of his movement — has swung from +36 early in his term to underwater at -4, a 40-point collapse.”

April 13, 2026 (Heather Cox Richardson/Letters from an American) — CPAC was funded by Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, which is a vassal state of Russia. Until this week, Orbán’s Hungary was the Republican model for the US — run by oligarchs and governed by right-wing extremist Christian values and massive corruption. With Orbán out in Hungary, we’ll see where that goes.

This is not a new thing in the US — time and again, wealthy men have decided the country would be better off if the oligarchs ran things. Oligarchs tried to take over in the 1860s — we fought the Civil War over it — 1890s, 1920s and 2000s.

“Establishment Republicans who wanted a smaller government liked Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation, but they did not like the threat of government intervention in their business decisions to force them to adhere to right-wing moral values. They are also not keen on Trump’s rejection of Europe and destruction of the rules-based international order under pressure from Putin. That order facilitates international trade.

“In an op-ed in Fox News online [Monday], Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the old leader of the establishment Republicans, tried to sideline the MAGA Republicans when he wrote: ‘Watching this from Kentucky, it is hard to understand how some on the American right thought that staking U.S. influence on the outcome of a parliamentary election in a small, central European country was putting America’s interests first. To the extent that what happens in Hungary matters to America, it is a question of whether its actions on the world stage—not its social policies—align with America’s strategic interests.’

“Just as there is a blueprint for destroying democracy, there is also one for rebuilding it. ‘Let us now and here highly resolve to resume the country’s interrupted march along the path of real progress, of real justice, of real equality for all of our citizens, great and small,’ New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt said to the delegates at the Democratic National Convention in 1932 as American democracy struggled to resist fascism.

“‘Out of every crisis, every tribulation, every disaster, mankind rises with some share of greater knowledge, of higher decency, of purer purpose,’ FDR said. ‘Today we shall have come through a period of loose thinking, descending morals, an era of selfishness, among individual men and women and among Nations…. Let us be frank in acknowledgment of the truth that many amongst us have made obeisance to Mammon, that the profits of speculation, the easy road without toil, have lured us from the old barricades. To return to higher standards we must abandon the false prophets and seek new leaders of our own choosing.’

“‘I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people,’ FDR concluded. ‘Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage. This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.’”

Sam Altman profile misses the mark— Manton Reece: “I think talented journalists like Ronan Farrow had a chance to do some new reporting on where AI is now, what impact it will have on the economy and society, and they instead wrote an article about personality quirks and office drama.”

In praise of (some) compartmentalization — Cory Doctorow on how he gets so much work done, living with chronic pain, living with global anxiety, flow, Derek Thompson’s theory of familiar surprises, AI and its fundamental conservatism — “… by definition, AI tries to make a future that is similar to the past, because all it can do is extrapolate from previous data” — “passive flow”/“shitty flow”/“zombie flow” and “social media scroll-trances.”

Cory: “These are anxious times. I don’t know anyone who feels good right now. Particularly this week, as the Strait of Epstein emergency gets progressively worse, and there’s this January 2020 sense of the crisis on the horizon, hitting one country after another. Last week, Australia got its last shipment of fossil fuels. This week, restaurants in India are all shuttered because of gas rationing. People who understand these things better than I do tell me that even if Trump strokes out tonight and Hegseth overdoes the autoerotic asphyxiation, it’ll be months, possibly years, before things get back to ‘normal’ (‘normal!’).

“Any time I think about this stuff for even a few minutes, I start to feel that covid-a-comin', early-2020 feeling, only it’s worse this time around, because I literally couldn’t imagine what covid would mean when it got here, and now I know.”

Dish’s bad behavior leaves property owners in the lurch (Fierce Network) — Outstanding reporting and writing by my colleague Monica Alleven about how Dish’s exit from the wireless industry leaves small, family-owned businesses on the hook for crippling property damage. Monica talks to small business owners left struggling after Dish’s maneuvers.

Amazon to acquire Globalstar for $11.57 billion (Monica (again)/Fierce Network)

Data center construction is moving to the midwest in search of power (Diana Goovaerts/Fierce Network)

Two Visions: Politics of love, or politics of fear? — Hamilton Nolan writes about a labor rally in New York and the underlying ethic of solidarity.

“Your fight is mine, and my fight is yours, and we will stand together. We are all family. We will support one another. More simply, it is a vision that rests on love. Love as the guiding force in our interactions with one another. The solidarity, and the organizing, and the political action, and the policy choices are all downstream of the foundation of love. If you decide that you will love humanity then the choices that follow will make themselves.

“This is one of two fundamental ethics that give rise to the politics of the world. The other one is fear. If fear is your guiding principle, your dominant emotion, your primary motivating force, then your interactions with mankind will follow a separate but equally understandable path. You will barricade yourself from others, you will guard what you have, you will protect your own people from other people that you perceive not as comrades but as threats. You will build walls and buy guns and hire soldiers and hoard money and close your fist instead of open your arms. You will seek to dominate others as a way to get ahead of them dominating you. If fear is the basis of your vision, then all of these things become common sense, and the things that are motivated by love come to be seen as silly, utopian, unrealistic, openings to be exploited by the more steely-eyed people like you who understand how dangerous this world really is.

“Starting from a place of love produces one set of politics, and starting from a place of fear produces another. You can recognize the two sets of policies that arise just by looking at the world today.

“It is worth noting that which one of these starting points you choose is not an observation about how the world is—it is a choice about how you want the world to be. To settle on a politics of love is not to deny that the world can be a scary place. It is to decide that the way to make it better is to love one another rather than to kill one another. Solidarity does not arise because nobody is rude, selfish, angry, or annoying. It arises out of the understanding that we are all that way. The fact that people have bad qualities does not have to mean that our entire orientation towards life must be guided by those qualities. It can mean instead that we adopt the opposite qualities, and watch the force of the good unravel the bad.

“This is not a modern quandary. Wise people for thousands of years have understood these dynamics.”