Mitch's Blog

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.