RIP Val Kilmer. He played many roles, but I’ve long known and loved him as Doc Holliday in “Tombstone.”
Two wins for democracy today. Cory Booker in the Senate and Susan Crawford in Wisconsin.
I’m fighting a solo war to preserve the use of “invitation” as a noun.
Ian Welsh: Trump is "speed-running" America's "imperial decline"
Trump’s Negotiating Is Failing.
Welsh says Trump is “picking too many fights all once, his tariff threats are incoherent and unplanned, he’s defunding research and forcing brilliant scientists and engineers and scholars out of the US, has no industrial policy worth speaking of and is destroying America’s governing capacity with capricious cuts to the federal bureaucracy.”
Perhaps most damaging of all, Trump is giving every other nation of the world “reason to route around America like it’s damage: to stop using the US dollar, to move to using local currencies for trade and to stop buying American goods and services, and yes, to stop selling to the US.”
Soon, Welsh says, other nations will stop enforcing American intellectual property law, which will sabotage the US tech sector. (Cory Doctorow advocates for this.)
My $0.02: But what about companies like Nvidia, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.! Companies like that are powerful engines of growth and will keep America strong!
Oh, yeah? Why would they want to stay in the US?
Crossing the U.S. Border? Here’s How to Protect Yourself (Nikita Mazurov, Matt Sledge / The Intercept)
What Is It Like Living With Long COVID? (Nicole Pajer / AARP) — Thanks, Julie!
Is There Life After Death? Jewish Thinking on the Afterlife
For a long time, I’ve thought that we Jews did not believe in an afterlife — that we believed we should live well and do what’s right for its own sake, not for the sake of entering heaven after we die.
Turns out that this is just one of a multitude of afterlife beliefs in Jewish tradition — many Jews believe in reincarnation, many believe in resurrection on Judgment day and some even believe our souls are transported to Jerusalem through a network of subterranean tunnels while being beaten to a pulp by demons (which sounds like no fun at all).
I’m sticking with “do right because it’s the right thing to do.” I like the sound of that. If we are rewarded in an afterlife, that’s a bonus. But I think that when our brains stop it’s lights out.
Re-learning how to read books
I read very few books in the late 2010s, while consuming massive quantities of articles and posts. That bothered me. A few years ago, I learned that book-reading is a skill, different from reading articles and certainly very different from reading social media posts. I retaught that skill to myself. Now I’m up to about a dozen books a year and I can live with that.
I generally read two books at once. I like to do one fiction and one non-fiction.
When I was a teen-ager, I read five books a week. I had more free time then.
Cory: The AOC-Sanders anti-oligarch tour is all about organizing
Cory Doctorow at Pluralistic: Obama ran a grassroots political campaign but put his “organization into an induced coma between elections,” thereby losing “an important source of discipline and feedback” … “Obama ran like a populist, but governed like Chuck Schumer.”
For me, one of the big lessons of 2024 is that political campaigns and primary fights aren’t just a means for the people to choose candidates; they are also a means for the candidates and parties to learn what the people want and adjust strategy and messaging accordingly. Harris and the Democrats deprived themselves of that opportunity and we are all paying the penalty.
J.D. Shapiro, who wrote the screenplay for “Battlefield Earth,” apologizes for writing “the suckiest movie ever” (NY Post) — I believe this gentleman is not sincere in his apology and in fact has no regrets. Heh. (Thanks, Cory!)