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“The Dems are terrible at politics. They should be running ads on TV saying that no workers in the fields means food prices soaring as we’ll have to import food because all the American crops are dead because there was no one to harvest them.” scripting.com/2025/09/0…

“Reminder: Sept 18, one week from today, is the 3rd anniversary of the 20th anniversary of the release of RSS 2.0.” I love RSS. I use it every day, and have for more than 20 years. scripting.com

I published and deleted two posts about Charlie Kirk yesterday, and then wrote one more today, and I don’t expect to publish it.

Anything I can think to say about the subject seems like something that will just add heat, rather than light, to a situation that’s already in danger of boiling over.

ActivityPub and ATPro need to fully interoperate. A Mastodon user should be able to follow a BlueSky user and vice versa.

It’s insane that this is not possible today. My iPhone on AT&T doesn’t care if you have a Samsung phone on Verizon. We can just talk to each other.

Twitter, Threads and Tumblr have financial interests in blocking interoperability. Mastodon and Bluesky do not have those interests. So what’s the hold-up?

Elizabeth Warren sends a letter to Whiskey Pete Hegseth questioning whether it’s a good idea to grant a $200 million defense contract to Elon Musk’s MechaHitler. theverge.com

Apple’s new crossbody phone strap has a surprisingly interesting history, going back to the 1940s, when fashion designers started shrinking or removing women’s pockets “because they interfered with the form-fitting silhouettes popularized by Christian Dior’s ‘New Look.'” theverge.com

I probably won’t get the strap; my phone lives in my left front pants pocket most days.

Authoritarianism Feels Surprisingly Normal—Until It Doesn’t. Life in Venezuela was deceptively mundane. Then everything collapsed. [The Atlantic]

I am 50 followers away from 1,000 followers on Mastodon. A few dozen of you fuckers better unfollow me now because I can’t stand the pressure.

San Diego protests, rallies and resources to help you push back against tyranny

The Trump administration just pulled off the industrial policy equivalent of lighting your own house on fire to prove you have working smoke alarms.

Blue Revolution on Facebook:

On September 4 federal agencies swarmed Hyundai’s gleaming Georgia battery plant construction site like it was Pablo Escobar’s hacienda. Four hundred seventy five people were arrested, most of them South Korean nationals flown in by subcontractors to help build the very factory Trump’s White House has been bragging about for two years as proof America is “open for business.” It was the largest worksite raid in DHS history, which is less a milestone than a confession that your economic strategy and your immigration crackdown are literally punching each other in the face.

Diplomatically, Seoul is furious. The South Korean foreign ministry expressed “concern and regret,” which is diplomatic code for “you clowns just humiliated our investors and we have to pretend we still like you.” Keep in mind South Korean firms have pledged one hundred fifty billion dollars in U.S. investments, twenty six billion of that from Hyundai alone. So Washington begged Seoul to anchor its electric vehicle supply chain here, gave them fat tax incentives, and then Trump sent in stormtroopers to drag their engineers out of the trailer office. Nothing says ‘welcome partner’ quite like zip ties and detention buses.

I didn’t enjoy watching Idiocracy, and I certainly am not enjoying living it.

Also shared privately by the same friend, who is on a roll: “The socialism that scares me nowadays is national socialism.”

Shared privately by a friend, in reaction to Florida banning vaccine mandates: “Florida is the meth lab of democracy.”

A family came in with their 2mo. And they were very hesitant about vaccines. “Which ones are really important?” So I went through each disease for which the child would be vaccinated today.

www.tumblr.com/mostlysig…

The WKRP: Johnny Fever Mix

A three-hour playlist of great 70s rock hits compiled from every DJ break that Dr. Johnny Fever made on “WKRP in Cincinnati,” with introductions and comments by the Doctor himself, news from Les Nessman, and a commercial read by Venus Flytrap. I’ve listened to more than an hour so far and only heard one bad song.

A friend sent me this link, which caused my wife and me to rewatch the first episode of “WKRP.” It holds up.

Jon Nelson, who created the mix, describes himself as a college and community radio producer, audio editor and artist. He’s also done mixes for other fictional DJs, including WKRP’s Venus Flytrap and Chris in the Morning from “Northern Exposure."

After listening to the Johnny Fever mix for a while, I remembered that there are Internet archives of hours or radio DJ sets, recorded off the air on tape, digitized, and uploaded to the Internet. I found this hour of Dan Ingram on WABC New York from September 1976. I was a teenager then, living in that area, and might have listened to that hour live! But listening to it for a little while this morning reminded me that I didn’t much like WABC; I was a 99X guy and, in the 80s, WBAB. Listening also reminded me that 99% of the pop music in the 1970s was bad. However, Sturgeon’s Law probably applies here.

Dan Ingram had a heck of a career, well respected for his quick wit, spanning 50 years on radio stations and a little TV, including 22 years at WABC. “One of Ingram’s unique skills was his ability to ‘talk up’ to the lyrics of a record, meaning speaking over the musical introduction and finishing exactly at the point when the lyrics started.”

I have never liked the word “mouthfeel.” Ironically, I don’t like the way it feels in my mouth when I say it. And when I hear it or read it, I think of how it feels in my mouth.

If only there were a shorter, punchier way of saying “how something feels in your mouth.”

Stop saying “wrap your head around.” It’s a cliche, and it makes me think of catastrophic motorcycle accidents.

I was able to pill the dog this morning using “the force open her mouth, pop it in the back of her throat” method with minimal trauma to either of us. And I finished the operation with the same number of fingers I started out with.

“The housing crisis isn’t just a result of greedy landlords and investors. It’s an inevitable result of social policies that encourage people to treat their houses as in investment. Because once a homeowner internalizes the idea that their financial future depends on housing prices going up, they start favoring policies (such as NIMBYism) that make housing prices go up. “ www.tumblr.com/rudywiser…

If America continues on the path it is on now, today’s babies will grow up to dream of a life in India or China, because they will have no future here worth living.

Normalize not having TVs on in waiting rooms and other public places. If people want something to watch, they have phones.

The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.

— Grover Cleveland, as quoted by Heather Cox Richardson in a brief history of the first Labor Day.

Spoiler: Labor Day was founded as a sop to labor after business interests defeated the labor movement.

I enjoyed chick lit and my dick didn't fall off

“Elizabeth Gilbert has a new memoir out.” The mere sentence radiates gentle inspiration–watercolors, billowy pants with elephants printed on them, sparkly truthtelling in a big straw hat.

— Elizabeth Gilbert’s Latest Epiphanies, by Jia Tolentino

I dismissed Gilbert as trivial until I heard her interviewed on Debbie Millman’s Design Matters podcast a few years ago and was impressed. Gilbert was promoting her novel, “City of Girls,” and I read that and loved it.

Debbie has exposed me to a couple of books I would normally have dismissed as women’s literature, written by women whom I previously dismissed as frivolous, and I have been surprised to find I loved the interviews and the books and that the authors were formidable. The other one was Susanna Hoffs, lead singer of the 80s group the Bangles and author of the novel “This Bird Has Flown."

Debbie and I were friends when we were teenagers, and I still think of her as a friend, even though we haven’t spoken in more than 35 years. I’ve followed her career from afar with great interest, happiness and respect.

Enshittification reaches beyond the grave

“Deadbots,” or digital representations of the deceased, are getting more persuasive, and companies are trying to figure out how to make money off them.

They’re giving interviews advocating for tougher gun laws, such as when the family of Joaquin Oliver, a victim of the 2018 Parkland school shooting in Florida, created a beanie-wearing AI avatar of him and had it speak with journalist Jim Acosta in July. “This is just another advocacy tool to create that urgency of making things change,” Manuel Oliver, Joaquin’s father, told NPR.

And in May, a bearded AI avatar of Chris Pelkey, the deceased victim of a road rage incident in Arizona, gave a video impact statement at the sentencing of the man who fatally shot Pelkey. Pelkey’s family created the deadbot. “I feel that that was genuine,” said Judge Todd Lang after hearing the AI generated impact statement. He then handed down the maximum sentence.

Eventually, maybe you’ll be having a nice chat with your dead grandma, and she’ll try to convince you to buy crypto.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an executive order requiring law enforcement, including feds, to wear masks and ID and activate body cameras when operating in the city. The order is almost certainly symbolic because Johnson lacks federal jurisdiction.

Asked about how effective his order is going to be given that federal agents don’t take orders from him, Johnson shot back: “Yeah, and I don’t take orders from the federal government. Thank you all very much.”

“The only mask ban I support."

I’ve been feeling nostalgic recently for Long Island, where I grew up. This Reddit thread is gratifying: What things represent Long Island?. Top comment: “A large paper bag filled with an assortment of fresh bagels” Followed by: “A hot salt bagel that you eat in the car on the way home because it’s a sin not to eat a hot bagel.”

The capitalism of fools: Trump’s mirror-world New Deal.

Cory Doctorow: Trump’s tariffs, demands of government stakes in companies and selective antitrust enforcement superficially echo left‑leaning industrial policy. But Trump’s policies aren’t thought out; they’re just performative chaos. Trump is part of a right-wing mirror world of imagined conspiracies that superficially resemble real problems. One danger is that when Trump is gone, America will desperately need robust state action, but Trump’s bad example will convince America that all state action is reckless.

The problem isn’t that tariffs are always bad, nor is it that demanding state ownership stakes in structurally important companies that depend on public funds is bad policy. The problem is that Trump’s version of these policies sucks, because everything Trump touches dies, and because he governs solely on vibes, half-remembered wisdom imparted by the last person who spoke to him, and the dying phantoms of old memories as they vanish beneath a thick bark of amyloid plaque.

Heather Cox Richardson shares a brief history of the Chicano movement of the 1960s. She uses the 1970 police killing of journalist Rubén Salazar as a launch point.

… in the 1960s, young Mexican Americans, most of whom had been born in the U.S., began to reimagine their community and its position in the United States. Calling themselves “Chicanos,” they called for a new identity based in the understanding that they were not outsiders at all, but rather natives of the northern region of old Mexico, a region that did not become part of the United States until long after the Chicano people–Indigenous Americans mixed with the descendents of Spanish invaders–had settled there.

Chicanos noted that they had not moved into the United States, but rather the United States border had moved over them. The U.S. had taken over the land on which they lived in 1848 after the U.S.-Mexico War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which had established the new boundary between the two countries far to the south of where it had been before, was supposed to guarantee the land titles of those Mexican landowners over whom the border had moved. But U.S. courts had disregarded the terms of the treaty and refused to recognize the rights of Mexicans, most of whom lost their land.

I knew that the US took the land I live on from Mexico in 1848. We learned about that in public school in New York, where I grew up. But until now I did not make the connection that many of my Latino neighbors have ancestry in America far longer than my own.

Qualified people get fired or leave. Sycophants, stooges, frauds, charlatans, lackeys, lickspittles, bootlickers, and phonies take over. And this prescription is being filled across all of government, making the prognosis for the country’s health, both now and into the future, increasingly bleak.

— Dave Pell, NextDraft

The latest government cut made by the Trump administration is a single consonant. But it’s a pretty important one. At this point, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) might as well be renamed the CD, as RFK Jr’s quackery-based attacks on facts and science are squeezing out the experts who know something about the control and prevention part of the job.

— Dave Pell, NextDraft

I’m back to Obsidian after 10 months in the wilderness

I was an Obsidian addict for years until October 2024, when I decided to use DevonThink for a while. But this week I listened to the Verge’s interview with Obsidian CEO Steph “kepano” Ango and decided to take another look at Obsidian. And I like it. I think I’ll stick with it.

So what are the major advances in Obsidian since October? I know about Bases, and am looking forward to learning about that. What else?

What am I likely to have forgotten in my 10 months wandering in exile?

Yes, I know I can answer these questions by exploring the documentation, forums and various communities. And I plan to do that. But I also think it might be fun to have this discussion here. Those of you who are bothered by my request can feel free to ignore this topic and enjoy this video instead.

I almost came home with another dog this morning, a sweet-faced chihuahua/German shepherd mix. (And isn’t that an unlikely romance?) The woman walking her said she was a foster, and available for adoption. But I resisted temptation.

The foster dog showed no interest in either me or Minnie, and the woman said the foster has a history of being hostile to men. Also, Julie definitely does not want another dog. So I see no reason why adopting that dog would have been a bad idea.

The scarcity of public toilets is a perfect example of American thinking in 2025. Americans would literally shit their pants to avoid the possibility of reducing a homeless person’s suffering.

A good day for our man Gavin

Some days, I hate Gavin Newsom. Some days I love him.

A few months ago, I announced to a friend that if Gavin Newsom is the nominated candidate for President in 2028, I would quit the party. This was around the time that Newsom was hosting his MAGA-curious podcast and making anti-trans statements.

But other days, I have felt like if the Democrats don’t nominate Newsom, I’ll walk.

I was loving Newsom beginning August 14. That was a good day for our man Gavin.

Newsom held a firecracker of a press conference Thursday, announcing the launch of a statewide effort to fight back against Trump’s attempts to rig Texas' elections..

Trump and his cronies are nakedly and without pretense planning to gerrymander Texas, redrawing district lines to generate five additional Congressional seats for the Republican Party.

Newsom and his allies said, effectively, fine then. You gerrymander Texas, we’ll gerrymander California for the Democrats.

Perhaps equally important was the plain language Newsom used:

“California will not sit idle as Trump and his Republican lapdogs shred our country’s democracy before our very eyes," he said. “In just six months, Trump’s unchecked power has cost Americans billions and taken an ax to the greatest democracy we’ve ever known. This moment calls for urgency and action – that is what we are putting before voters this November, a chance to fight back against his anti-American ways.”

Unlike Trump’s naked power grab, the Election Rigging Response Act will be decided by California voters in November. And it will be a temporary change, through 2030, with redistricting returning to the state Citizens Redistricting Commission. And it keeps California’s current Congressional maps if Texas and other states also keep their original maps.

“The damage the Trump administration is causing to our country is clear: masked agents terrorizing communities, tax dollars wasted on military stunts, allies alienated, and loyalists hired to replace public servants,” said Senator Alex Padilla. “This administration is out of control—and the Election Rigging Response Act is how California defends our democracy and fights back.”

And there were a roster of other patriotic Democrats joining Newsom, including San Diego’s Lorena Gonzaez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, AFL-CIO; and La Mesa’s State Sen. Akilah Weber Pierson, M.D., chair of the California Legislative Black Caucus.

Under the redistricting proposal, the 48th Congressional District, straddling Riverside and San Diego Counties and held by Rep. Darrell Issa, would move from “safe Republican” to a “lean Democratic” seat.

Newsom trolled Trump on social media:

DONALD IS FINISHED — HE IS NO LONGER “HOT.” FIRST THE HANDS (SO TINY) AND NOW ME — GAVIN C. NEWSOM — HAVE TAKEN AWAY HIS “STEP.” MANY ARE SAYING HE CAN’T EVEN DO THE “BIG STAIRS” ON AIR FORCE ONE ANYMORE — USES THE LITTLE BABY STAIRS NOW. SAD! TOMORROW HE’S GOT HIS “MEETING” WITH PUTIN IN “RUSSIA.” NOBODY CARES. ALL THE TELEVISION CAMERAS ARE ON ME, AMERICA’S FAVORITE GOVERNOR. EVEN LOW-RATINGS LAURA INGRAM (EDITS THE TAPES!) CAN’T STOP TALKING ABOUT MY BEAUTIFUL MAPS. YOU’RE WELCOME FOR LIBERATION DAY, AMERICA! DONNIE J MISSED “THE DEADLINE” (WHOOPS!) AND NOW I RUN THE SHOW. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! — GCN

The specifics of Newsom’s proposal are important, but it’s also important what it represents: Democratic willingness to fight for America.

Newsom’s fighting spirit is a refreshing change for a party that has seemingly spent the last decade or more as the party that “would bring a pencil to the knife fight," as Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said.

During Newsom’s press conference, Trump demonstrated what’s at stake.. Trump sent more than a dozen Border Patrol agents, masked and armed, to stand outside the press venue. It was a show of force meant to intimidate California and force us to bend the knee.

The show of courage by Newsom, Democratic leaders and allies was great. It was a refreshing moment in a time when — as one person said on social media — “its just nothing but bad news these days. even the good news is just ‘federal judge temporarily pauses bad news’".

But it’s not enough. Newsom is still the man who loaned his platform to MAGA extremists and spoke out against trans people. The Democratic Party needs to decide firmly and definitively whether it represents all the American people — including trans people — or attempt to pander to Republican supporters who will never support us.

I wrote this for the newsletter of the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club, where I am a board member at large.

 I dislike Discord

I dislike it so much that I’ve decided to stop participating in all Discord forums.

Reddit and webforums (particularly those based on Discourse software) are great. Even mailing lists can be pretty good.

But Discord is a mess. Too many channels. Every time I visit one, it’s like I’m walking in on the middle of a conversation and have no idea what people are talking about.

Discord is meant for people who live on Discord and pop in a couple of times an hour to catch up. That’s not me.

I’m feeling a little the same way about timelines — Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads and Facebook and of course X. In the case of timelines, it all seems to be people talking past each other. Tumblr is better, but mostly I’m on Tumblr for the memes and vintage illustrations and photos.

Venice floats on millions of tree trunks that workers pounded vertically into the mud over a thousand years to erect vast stone buildings on top of floating foundations. This is wild, and I had no idea. www.bbc.com/future/ar…

“We need shittable cities (actively maintained public restrooms).… A city without well-maintained restrooms is a city where many of the chronically ill cannot leave their homes, and where the homeless are criminalized for bodily functions.” www.tumblr.com/vautour-c…

Questionable coffee

I bought a new coffee on Sunday and did not care for it, but I’ve been continuing to drink it because my parents grew up in the Great Depression, and they would rise from their graves and admonish me if I threw out perfectly usable food.

But it occurred to me yesterday that if I put the coffee in the chest freezer, that would not be throwing it out. And that’s what I did, and I bought a couple of bags of our usual Sumatra, which we like.

And now the bad coffee will live in the freezer forever, slowly working its way to the bottom, like deep-sea creatures sinking to the ocean depths, where the coffee will spend eternity with other foods we have no use for but can’t bear to throw out, such as the bread pudding I bought a few years ago, not realizing I was buying a whole loaf of bread pudding, and foolishly put in the freezer before I had cut the loaf into individual portions. (What the hell am I going to do with a massive loaf of frozen-solid bread pudding? It wasn’t even good bread pudding.)

One day, hopefully in the distant future, Julie and I will both be dead, and the Questionable Coffee will be our heirs' problem.

Things that don’t bother me that seem to bother other people:

  • Apologizing when I’m wrong. Just do it and get it over with. It’s a lot more trouble to twist yourself up in knots justifying bad behavior. Everybody fucks up now and then. Apologize and move on.
  • Going bald. When I was young, I had long, thick hair. If there were an inexpensive, low-hassle way to get that hair back, I’d do it, but no such treatment exists, so that’s that. When I had a full head of hair, it was wild, and I had to beat it into submission every day. This way is more convenient, and I look ok as I am.
  • Picking up dog poop.

Today I’ve been messaging folks I haven’t communicated with in years, and it’s been interesting to see what the last messages we sent each other were, three years ago or whatever.

Maga’s boss class think they are immune to American carnage: They’re in for a surprise. pluralistic.net/2025/08/1…

Cory Doctorow:

… The Maga base wants a bunch of stuff that the Maga elites would never tolerate, but that’s OK, because the Maga elites are pretty sure they will never have to suffer under the laws they pass for others. Peter Theil is happy to support a political movement whose dominant factions would like to put him – and every other gay man – in a concentration camp, because he’s pretty sure that only applies to the poor gays, not the billionaire gays.

Financiers who back Trump know that they can afford to transport their daughters, wives, mistresses and the housekeepers, babysitters and teenagers they impregnate across state lines (or national borders) to get an abortion should the need arise. Their participation in Maga was a bet that after victory was attained, the base could be made to settle for performative cruelty against people other than them.

MAGA’s boss class are counting on so-called moderate Democrats to bail them out when the bubble pops, as happened in 2008, Cory says.

Or they will count on that bailout. For now, I don’t think they’re thinking that far ahead. They’re thinking the hell-bound train will never arrive at its destination.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That…

Here’s something that I’m thinking about: The subprime mortgage bubble in 2008 looted the financial sector. That was catastrophic, but the feds dipped into the rest of the economy to bail out the financial sector.

Today’s looters, led by Trump, are pillaging the entire economy. When they’re done, will there be anything left to bail them out with?

Civilizations fall. It could well be our turn. And that turn may come within a few years, or even months.

No, these thoughts don’t keep me up at night. They’re too big to contemplate. I just go along living my day-to-day life, not too different from how I lived it in the 2010s.

Scams And Bribery Are Becoming the Foundation of Our Economy. “The United States government taking steps to deliberately introduce cryptocurrency into the heart of our nation’s economy is kind of like a healthy person deciding to pick up a syringe and inject an unknown, harmful virus into themselves. Stick it right in the heart there!” www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/scams-a…

Events that mark the passing of the year: New Year’s Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, my birthday, buying another year’s supply of dog poop bags, Labor Day, Julie’s birthday, etc.

Our two elderly cats, who previously hated each other and couldn’t stand to be in the same room, now lay companionably next to each other on the bed or on the floor.

They seem to have grown fond of each other. For now. It may be leading to a whole “whatever happened to baby Jane” situation.

Also, they were both terribly afraid of the dog, and kept to the back of the house, but now they are conscious of which room the dog is in, and will roam freely around the other rooms.

Seriously, I am confused by these changes. If they were acting badly, I would attribute it to feline dementia, but what accounts for this sudden outburst of more well adjusted behavior?

ICE arrested a mother outside a Chula Vista, San Diego, elementary school for overstaying her visa. They arrested Kyungjin Yu, an immigrant from South Korea, as students were arriving for class. www.kpbs.org/news/bord…

Trump has said America was at its richest 1870-1913, a time when the average life expectancy was about 48 and many children died before their fifth birthday. Trump wants to go back to that. By Molly Jong-Fast. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/1…

The A.O.C. Deepfake Was Terrible. The Proposed Solution Is Delusional. By Zeynep Tufekci. Some clown distributed a deepfake video of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denouncing the Sydney Sweeney jeans ad as racist. Andrew Cuomo denounced AOC. But it never happened. AOC never said it. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/1…

A unvaccinated teen-ager brought 2025’s first case of measles to San Diego County. He may have exposed others in Scripps Clinic Torrey Pines Urgent Care and Rady Children’s Emergency Department. timesofsandiego.com/health/20…

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth resposted a video of a self-described Christian nationalist pastor whose church doesn’t believe women should be allowed to vote. “Doug Wilson, senior pastor of Christ Church in Idaho, said during the interview with CNN that, ‘Women are the kind of people that people come out of.’ … In the CNN interview, Wilson also defended previous comments where he had said there was mutual affection between slaves and their masters. He also said that sodomy should be recriminalized….. In his repost of the interview on the platform X, Hegseth added, ‘All of Christ for All of Life.’….

“Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told NPR in an emailed statement on Saturday that Hegseth is a ‘proud member of a church affiliated with the Congregation of Reformed Evangelical Churches,’ which was founded by Wilson.”

www.kpbs.org/news/poli…

Dave Pell: “As crazy as you think these guys are, they’re crazier.”

nextdraft.com/archives/…

AOL is discontinuing dial-up internet service after 34 years. Though AOL says the number of dial-up subscribers it has is in the thousands, the US government estimates that about 265,000 people still depend on dial-up Internet. I am more surprised to learn AOL is still around than I am to learn dial up is still around. www.techspot.com/news/1090…