Mitch's Blog

… for more than 200 years, the American people have elected a buffoon’s gallery of rogues, incompetents, empty suits, abysmal spellers, degenerate golfers and corrupt Marylanders to the Vice Presidency with barely a passing consideration that they might one day have to assume the highest office in the land.

From the book “Veeps: Profiles in Insignificance,” by Bill Kelter and Wayne Shellabarger, which is definitely going on my to-be-read list. Reviewed by Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr. Thanks, Cory!

Forget 10,000 steps: 7 tips for step counters.

The notion to take 10,000 daily steps stems from a marketing ploy: As the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics approached, a Japanese researcher decided to nudge his nation to be more active by offering pedometers with a name that loosely translated as “10,000-step meter.” (The Japanese character for the number 10,000 looks a little like a person walking.)

For “men and women younger than age 60, the greatest relative reductions in the risk of dying prematurely came with step counts of between about 8,000 and 10,000 per day,” according to a 2022 study pooling results from 47,457 adults of all ages.

For people older than 60, the threshold was a little lower. For them, the sweet spot for reduced mortality risk was 6,000 to 8,000 steps per day.

Robin Wright:

Ten conflicts among diverse rivals or in different arenas over disparate flash points and divergent goals are now converging. For all the recent punditry warning about a widening war, the trajectory has long been obvious. And for all the American warships, troops, and diplomats deployed in the Middle East over the past hundred days, the U.S. has produced little, if anything, beyond greater vulnerabilities. “The U.S. appears pretty disconnected from regional realities, which may have been an intentional approach to enable withdrawal,” Julien Barnes-Dacey, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “But now that Washington has been sucked back in by the Israel war, it’s looking pretty lost.”

Also:

U.S. intelligence has warned of growing Arab and Muslim support for Hamas, which is designated a terrorist group by the U.S. and Europe. At the Doha Forum last month, I heard from dozens of Arabs who condemned Hamas tactics and disagreed with its ideology, even as they admired or envied its determined resistance to Israel and defiance of U.S influence. “In this kind of a fight, the center of gravity is the civilian population,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin acknowledged in December. “And if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat.” He noted, “It would compound this tragedy if all that awaited Israelis and Palestinians at the end of this awful war was more insecurity, more rage, and more despair.”

And:

In 2002, the Houthis' founding slogan was “God is the greatest, death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, victory to Islam.”

The Reason the Office Isn’t Fun Anymore. Employees are hiding out in privacy booths and empty conference rooms, turning workplaces into quiet zones.

Did offices used to be “fun”? I must have missed it.

A company backed by Silicon Valley billionaires is seeking local voter approval to build a walkable city from scratch for 50,000 people on farmland in Solano County, located in northern California between Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Backers include LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. “Eventually, the city could grow to 400,000 people, the group says, but only if it can create at least 15,000 jobs that pay above-average wages.”

I love the spirit behind this idea. California is in a housing crisis. It’s a disaster, like an earthquake or wildfire, and we need bold solutions.

This has been bugging me for more than a year. Now I have the answer and can relax and move on.

The three-decade saga that led to the Crown Heights Tunnels: A group of anti-establishment yeshiva students from Israel took control of the Chabad-Lubavitch synagogue in Brooklyn and started digging.

Underground tunnels were discovered last week near the synagogue, and the rowdy yeshiva students rioted to block repairs.

The students, who come from the Israeli city Tzfat and are called Tzfatim, are “extreme Meshichists.”

Meshichists – or Messianists – are Chabad Hasidim who believe that their late leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, is the Messiah, and despite his death in 1994, is still meant to reappear. Tzfatim are perceived to be, even by Meshichist standards, unusually fervent in their beliefs and have been involved in numerous incidents of violence and mayhem for nearly three decades.

…

When Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson assumed the leadership of the Chabad-Lubavitch community in 1951, he delivered a seminal public address, which set the movement’s guiding principle for the next seven decades: “We are the last generation. It is our job to bring Moshiach” – the Hebrew term for the Messiah.

…

His followers heard something else too: their leader, in their view, was declaring himself the Messiah. What exactly he said and what he meant and how he meant it would be hotly debated over the years, but in a broad sense, Chabad Messianism became established Chabad doctrine.

‘It hasn’t delivered’: The spectacular failure of self-checkout technology

David French: Disqualify Trump (or else).

There’s no doubt that knocking Trump off the ballot would send shock waves through the American body politic, but why would anyone believe that it’s inherently less destabilizing if Trump runs?

We already know what he does when he loses. For him, counting the votes is only the beginning of the battle. If he loses, he’ll challenge the results, conspire to overturn the election and incite political violence.

And if he wins? Then you have an insurrectionist in command of the most powerful military in the world, who is hellbent on seeking vengeance on his political enemies. Does anything at all sound stabilizing about that?

Bobi, the “oldest ever dog,” has lost his title as Guinness World Records launches an investigation into claims he lived to 31. “Sceptics have asked why photos purportedly of Bobi in his youth would show him with white paws when they were brown in his later years.”