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On the Democratic Party Style:

I don’t think I’ve ever encountered, outside academia, people with such a bottomless appetite for mountainous piles of meaningless, unnecessary, empty words and phrases, each genetically engineered, in whole or in part, to make any sentient being stop paying attention. Reading this speech, that is the only conclusion I can come to: that the sole purpose of this speech is to make people stop paying attention.

Posted privately by a friend, shared with his permission:

Lost in the Trump regime’s ongoing disinformation campaign is the fact that not one member of the Trump family has served in the military.

Ever.

And I suspect no one in his administration has a child who is in harm’s way. This is also true of all the chicken hawks cheering them on. It’s always someone else’s family who will pay the Butcher’s Bill.

Elsewhere, a friend praised the TV series “Monsieur Spade.” I replied:

I loved “Monsieur Spade.” It has flaws that would have made another series unwatchable, but in this case the show’s many strong virtues made the flaws inconsequential. It hits the notes of noir hard, but it has characteristics that make it definitely not noir.

The showrunner for “Monsieur Spade” is Scott Frank, who was also behind “The Queen’s Gambit,” “Department Q” and “Godless.”

Because he’s a behind-the-scenes guy, I did not become aware of him until last year, when he did one or two interviews. But his IMDB page shows he was behind some of my all-time favorite movies and TV shows.

A private post by a friend, shared with his permission:

Another stupid fucking war in the Middle East.

Just say no. No more wars in the Middle East, ever, for any reason. Stay the hell away from that black hole. Over the course of my life the amount of blood and treasure we have poured into this black hole is staggering, and for what. What’s it good for? Absolutely nothing.

I especially resent the USA becoming Netanyahu’s bitch. Bibi has wanted to drag the USA into war with Iran for a very long time. He finally found a sucker to buy into that. A divorce from Israel cannot come soon enough. I am done with them. Israel is a liability. Get it off the national balance sheet, please. What is the USA getting out of this relationship? More wars? Hard pass.

There is nothing in the Middle East worth the bones of a single American GI, to paraphrase Bismarck.

The only regime change I am interested in is here in the USA.

Maybe this war helps that along, so there is that. Trump’s casus belli? Because fuck you, that’s why. The public was not prepped for this. It is of course a massively illegal power grab, but that is par for the course for Trump.

I very much doubt this helps the GOP in the midterms. Especially the higher oil prices.

I would have phrased the comments about Israel less harshly. As an American Jew of a certain generation I feel a strong bond to Israel, and over the course of my lifetime I have had many positive and warm interactions with Israelis — as recently as last week.

But Israel has gone to a dark place since 2023, perhaps much longer than that, and as an American I say we need to stop letting them drag us behind them.

Heather Cox Richardson: The US DEA was running an investigation of Jeffrey Epstein and fourteen other people for drug trafficking, prostitution and money laundering. It started in 2010 under Obama. The task force running the investigation was dismantled under Trump.

“The basic question here is whether a bunch of rich pedophiles and Epstein accomplices are going to face any consequences for their crimes,” [Sen. Ron] Wyden said, “and Scott Bessent is doing his best to make sure they won’t. My head just about exploded when I heard Bessent say it wasn’t his department’s job to investigate these Epstein bank records…. From the beginning, my view has been that following the money is the key to identifying Epstein’s clients as well as the henchmen and banks that enabled his sex trafficking network. It’s past time for Bessent to quit running interference for pedophiles and give us the Epstein files he’s sitting on.”

Kansas and Scouting America’s anti-trans bigotry are disgraceful.

The airport background music is “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd, which I love. I remember when the only background music you heard in public was old people music, so this is a nice change.

I’m on my way to Salt Lake City, where there is winter, from home in mild San Diego. I put on my topcoat this morning, reached in my pocket, and discovered a badge from Mobile World Congress 2025, almost exactly a year ago, which shows you the last time I wore that coat.

I remember this is an annual ritual in temperate climates in October or November. You put on your coat for the first time in a half a year and discover some little time capsule from the last time you wore it — a movie ticket, a couple of dollars, a half-crumpled cigarette pack with three remaining smokes.

The "textcasting" idea is great but it's backwards

I love Dave Winer’s vision of textcasting (as discussed here by Kottke) but I think he’s mistaken putting the writer first. We need to put the reader first. I’m active on Facebook, Tumblr, BlueSky, LinkedIn Reddit and Micro.blog and a newsletter and I hate it because it’s too much fussing and cutting-and-pasting. I just want to post my things and have it reach my friends and family and everybody who’s interested in seeing it.

I think I’ll replace my smartphone with a dumb phone. Or maybe start smoking again. Carry around a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

I’m losing interest in “Starfleet Acadeny.” I don’t dislike it. I like it. But I forget to watch it.

An unpopular opinion about making coffee with the AeroPress

You should only use the AeroPress to make one cup of coffee at a time. Don’t weigh anything, don’t use external measures. One scoop of beans, grind, fill with water to the 4, stir, press and drink.

Aeropress is an excellent, convenient way to make one cup of great coffee. That is its virtue. It is a single-purpose device and it is fantastic at performing that purpose. If you’re making more than one cup, use another method.

If you’re weighing, measuring, taking precise temperatures and timing precisely, you need to rethink your life choices and go outside and touch grass.

Also, the AeroPress XL is an abomination.

Overheard: “90 percent of being married is yelling WHAT?! from other rooms.”

I follow the river of news approach for RSS feeds. I have done for twenty-plus years. I ignore unread counts. On the other hand, there are few RSS feeds where I do want to read every one that comes in. I use folders to separate the must-read streams from the high-volume, read-whenever feeds.

Voter ID isn't designed to protect voting. It's designed to steal elections.

Voter ID is a scam to disenfranchise millions of voters. The conservative Heritage Foundation, one of the biggest backers of the SAVE Act, which requires proof of citizenship to vote, claims voter fraud is a major issue. But in the groups own records, there have been 68 documented cases of residents casting a ballot in a US election since the 1980s.

That’s just 68 over the past 40 years — a fraud rate of 0.0001%.

The SAVE Act would require a passport or Real ID to vote, both of which cost money. It’s a poll tax, meant to punish people who can’t afford to pay.

I’ve been doing a lot of chopping lately. I like to have an apple nearly every day with lunch. My teeth have been bothering me for a couple of months — not enough to schedule an emergency dentist visit — but it’s uncomfortable for me to bite into an apple. So I’ve been cutting the apple into bite-sized pieces. And even though I don’t cook, I’ve gotten great at chopping, and also pretty good at not slicing open a finger.

Last weekend I decided to once again migrate my Mastodon usage to my blog at mitchwagner.com, hosted by Micro.blog, as my only outpost on the Fediverse. Micro.blog seems to work pretty well for me as a Mastodon client, though it has not in the past.

However, I’d still like to be able to see other people’s boosts from Micro.blog — that is a feature that @manton has steadfastly resisted implementing.

I have been a professional writer for more than 40 years and I still can’t figure out affect vs. effect. I have to look them up every single time I use one of those words. It’s affecting my mental health. Or effecting.

“There is nothing Christian about Christian nationalism”

Talarico is a Texas state lawmaker studying to be a minister, who criticizes the Republican use of Christianity as a political weapon. Such politicization of Christianity both distorts politics and cheapens faith, he says. The true way to practice Christianity is simple but not easy, he says: it is to love your neighbor. Political positions should grow out of that to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, and heal the sick. “[T]here is nothing Christian about Christian nationalism,” he told Colbert. “It is the worship of power in the name of Christ, and it is a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth.”

— Heather Cox Richardson

I was the first one on a Teams meeting this morning and for a few minutes it was just me and three note-taking and transcription AI bots.

I’m having a busy day so here is a recent photo of Minnie demanding her supper.

So much of the modern world makes you feel like a widget on a conveyor belt, as our fetishization of efficiency has begun to corrode our souls…. When people rage against the machines, this is a lot of what they are frustrated with. That you are a commodity in a network of apps, phone holds, and confusing websites.

— Chris Arnade, Is it Really So Much Better Now?

While a lot of TV actors were trying to mimic the mush-mouthed vocal delivery of big-screen movie stars like Marlon Brando or James Dean, Shatner went in the opposite direction. He enunciated his words carefully and broke his sentences into bite-sized pieces, making each clause a separate unit of delivery. He would speed up his cadence at times, and then bring it to a near halt. Shatner’s unique speaking style has been parodied countless times. Among living actors, probably only Christopher Walken’s line delivery has generated more parodies.

— 93 Years of Shatner

"Neither a robot nor a human but actually an entirely new entity"

What is Claude? Anthropic doesn’t know either

Gideon Lewis-Kraus at The New Yorker goes in depth with researchers at Anthropic attempting to understand how Claude works and finds AI is even more weird and confusing than we think:

The most candid A.I. researchers will own up to the fact that we are doing this because we can. As [Brown computer scientist Ellie Pavlick] wrote, the field originated with the aspiration “to understand intelligence by building it, and to build intelligence by understanding it.” She continued, “What has long made the AI project so special is that it is born out of curiosity and fascination, not technological necessity or practicality. It is, in that way, as much an artistic pursuit as it is a scientific one.” The systems we have created—with the significant proviso that they may regard us with terminal indifference—should inspire not only enthusiasm or despair but also simple awe.

In the eighteenth century, James Watt perfected the steam engine: a special box of fire that turned archaic fern sludge into factories, railroads, and skyscrapers. The Industrial Revolution happened without any theoretical knowledge of the physical principles that drove it. It took more than a century for us to piece together the laws of thermodynamics. This scientific advance led to such debatably beneficial things as the smartphone. But it also helped us explain why time flows forward, galaxies exist, and our universal fate is heat death.

Now we have a special box of electricity that turns Reddit comments and old toaster manuals into cogent conversations about Shakespeare and molecular biology. The sheer competence of language models has already revamped the human quest for self-knowledge.

Askell describes AI is “neither robot nor human but actually something new.” Based on my use of AI and learning about it, that’s a good way to describe it.

Has AI achieved intelligence? Define “intelligence.” In the 2022 book “Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intellience,” James Bridle argues that our definition of intelligence — which limits the phenomenon to humans and maybe some higher animals — is too narrow. Software is intelligent, as are analog computers, as are bonobos, jackdaws, bees and trees. Bridle is not arguing here that plants have “hidden lives,” like 1970s pseudoscientists argued, but that these machines, birds, animals and plants should be considered intelligent just on the basis of their observed behavior.

I’m skeptical that AI has achieved anything resembling human intelligence. It is not alive. But I’m even more skeptical of people who dismiss AI as just a fancy autocomplete.

Pair the New Yorker article with this essay by Matt Shumer, an AI entrepreneur and investor: Something big is happening.. Shumer says that within a year or two, AI will be better than humans at any job that’s now done at a screen. He compares the present moment to February 2020, the weeks before the pandemic hit, when nearly everyone went about their normal lives but a few people knew that the world was about to profoundly change.

Rubio brings Naziism to Munich

Marco Rubio went Nazi on America’s European (former) partners — at the Munich security conference last week, espousing a vision of Western civilization united by whiteness and Christianity.

Heather Cox Richardson:

… officials in the Trump administration and their media allies have embraced the Great Replacement theory that says Brown and Black migration to Europe and the U.S. is destroying “western civilization.” Such migration must be stopped, they argue, and Brown and Black people purged from the U.S. and Europe. The end of equal rights for migrants will enable white Christian men to dominate society and pass laws that reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal hierarchies have embraced the Great Replacement theory that says Brown and Black migration to Europe and the U.S. is destroying “western civilization.” Such migration must be stopped, they argue, and Brown and Black people purged from the U.S. and Europe. The end of equal rights for migrants will enable white Christian men to dominate society and pass laws that reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal hierarchies.

How can people like Rubio (son of Cuban immigrants), Stephen Miller (Jewish) and Peter Thiel (gay) can embrace an ideology that considers them to be second-class citizens at best and vermin at worst?

Post by @spocko@mastodon.online

@gardengeek here is Obama’s Follow up

I’m old enough to remember when we had an intelligent President who wasn’t an embarrassment every time he opened his mouth.

Changing how I handle blogging and social media (again)

I vibe-coded a thing! I coaxed Google Gemini to modify the template for mitchwagner.com to hide a specific category of posts from the home page. I’ve been wanting to do that for a couple of years but lacked the skills — I was able to do it in less than two hours with Gemini (including a lunch break lol).

The category is Mitchellaneous — it’s where I post memes and other Internet curiosities. I had been running that on a separate blog for a few weeks; now it’s all here. And folks who were signed up for my newsletters will now just receive one newsletter with everything (which is how I did the newsletters until a couple of weeks ago when I made the switch to two blogs and two newsletters).

Over the years, I’ve had a few ideas for how I want to handle blogging and social media, but haven’t had the coding chops to implement those ideas. With the help of AI, maybe I can finally do it.

Next up: Can I change my newsletter template so all the Mitchellaneous posts go at the end? Hold my beer….

I love the idea of a single app that reads RSS, Bluesky and Mastodon timelines, all in one place. I have tried Tapestry, Reeder and the Micro.blog timeline and none of them seem right for me. Am I missing an app that does what I am looking for?

People don't give Gene L. Coon and D.C. Fontana enough credit for Star Trek

When attempting to critique the values of a long-running franchise like STAR TREK, it’s important to draw a distinction between superficial issues and structural ones.

“Superficial” in this sense doesn’t mean “minor” or “unimportant”; it simply means that an issue is not so intrinsic to the premise that the franchise would collapse (or would be radically different) were it changed or removed. For example, misogyny has been a been pervasive problem across many generations of STAR TREK media, which have often been characterized by a particular type of leering-creep sexism that was distasteful at the time and has not improved with age. However, sexism and misogyny are not structural elements of the TREK premise; one can do a STAR TREK story where the female characters have agency and even pants without it becoming something fundamentally different from other TREK iterations (even TOS, although there are certainly specific TOS episodes that would collapse if you excised the sexism).

By contrast, the colonialism and imperialism are structural elements — STAR TREK is explicitly about colonizing “the final frontier” and about defending the borders, however defined, of an interstellar colonial power.

Also:

People don’t give Gene L. Coon enough credit for interrogating the Federation. I know it’s gotten better in recent years and fandom seem to be more willing, on the whole, to credit him and the equally fantastic D. C. Fontana with - quite frankly - doing much more than Roddenberry ever did during TOS’ original run, but it’s still not enough.

Interesting, enjoyable and thought-provoking. Read more: larasramblings.tumblr.com

We need a new amendment: The right to bear phones

Julia Angwin:

The nation’s founders worried that if the state had a monopoly on weapons, its citizens could be oppressed. Their answer was the Second Amendment. Now that our phones are the primary weapons of today’s information war, we should be as zealous about our right to bear phones as we are about our right to bear arms. To adopt the language of Second Amendment enthusiasts, perhaps the only thing that can eventually stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a camera.

As far as I can see, the only thing the national Democratic Party is good for is sending text messages asking me for donations. You want my fucking money? Do something!