We gave the cats flea treatments. The doctors say that I will now have to undergo many rounds of surgery and painful physical therapy, but I have a good chance of regaining the use of my shredded arms.
Links and ephemera Monday 8.4.2025
✪ Ninety laptops, millions of dollars: US woman jailed over North Korea remote-work scam. theguardian.com. Christina Chapman helped North Koreans pose as Americans living in the U.S. to get remote jobs.
✪ The Count of Monte Cristo review – you’ll have to pause every 45 seconds to shake your head at its daftness.theguardian.com
✪ ‘He has trouble completing a thought’: bizarre public appearances again cast doubt on Trump’s mental acuity. theguardian.com
✪ Brendan Carr declares victory over the First Amendment. theverge.com
✪ This Is the News From TikTok. When people use TikTok for news, what kind of information are they getting? theatlantic.com
Every night
John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn. “Fill your hand you sonofabitch!”
“After Hours” and “Barton Fink” are two movies where the trailers promised lighthearted comedy and I walked out of the theater feeling like I’d been punched in the face.
Links and ephemera Sunday 8.3.2025
✪ ‘Self-termination is most likely’: the history and future of societal collapse theguardian.com
Damian Carrington:
“We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,” says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.
“I’m pessimistic about the future,” he says. “But I’m optimistic about people.” Kemp’s new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens.
Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots.
The work is scholarly, but the straight-talking Australian can also be direct, such as when setting out how a global collapse could be avoided. “Don’t be a dick” is one of the solutions proposed, along with a move towards genuinely democratic societies and an end to inequality.
I am both seduced by and skeptical of these kinds of grand unified theories that use known information to derive new and counterintuitive conclusions that explain great swathes of history.
✪ Pregnant mother in Tennessee denied medical care for being unmarried tumblr.com
✪ What Working as a Mailman in Appalachia Revealed About Public Service - The Atlantic theatlantic.com
Delivering the mail is a ‘Halloween job,’ ” Stephen Starring Grant observes in Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home. “An occupation with a uniform, immediately recognizable, even by children.” What to call Grant’s book is harder to say. It is an unusual amalgam: a pandemic memoir, a love letter to the Blue Ridge Mountains, a participant observer’s ethnography of a rural post office, an indictment of government austerity, and a witness statement attesting to the remarkable and at times ruthless efficiency of one of our oldest federal bureaucracies. Not least, Mailman is a lament for the decline of service as an American ideal—for the cultural twilight of the Halloween job: those occupations, such as police officer, firefighter, Marine, and, yes, postal worker, whose worth is not measured first and foremost in dollars but in public esteem. Or should be, anyway.
At the same time, Grant’s project is immediately recognizable as “Hollywood material.” A corporate suit loses his job during COVID and spends a year as a rural blue-collar worker reconnecting with his inner country boy and coming to appreciate the dignity of physical labor–silently nursing, one suspects, the dream of a book contract (and maybe a studio option) all along. A stunt, in other words, that a cynic might see as more in the spirit of self-service than public service.
This tension isn’t lost on Grant, a proud son of Appalachia who’s suddenly laid off from a marketing agency and gets a job as a rural carrier associate for the Blacksburg, Virginia, post office. He second-guesses his qualifications–and his motivations–but doesn’t let either concern stop him.
✪ Thirty-Two short stories about death in prison. theatlantic.com. Prisoners are brutally abused and die of neglect in American prisons, often while guards laugh.
✪ You Went to a Drag Show—Now the State of Florida Wants Your Name. “Just like the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and other bills with misleading names, this isn’t about protecting children. It’s about using the power of the state to intimidate people government officials disagree with, and to censor speech that is both lawful and fundamental to American democracy.” eff.org
✪ The freedom to fuck off. mat.tl
✪ Marc Maron Has Some Thoughts About That. theatlantic.com
✪ Making America Epstein Again. Trump’s transactional ethics are making the U.S. a refuge for criminals. This mirrors something Israel has done for years. prospect.org
✪ How the Most Remote Community in America Gets Its Mail. theatlantic.com
✪ We’re Officially in Donald Trump’s Mad King Era. motherjones.com
✪ Micro.blog is now free for teachers and nurses. manton.org I host mitchw.blog on micro.blog. Bravo, Manton!
✪ How Cosby’s ‘Pound Cake’ Speech Helped Lead to His Downfall. theatlantic.com
Steven Spielberg on the set of Jaws in 1974
LINCOLN, NEBRASKA, 1942. photographs: John Vachon
Habitat 67 in Montreal, designed by Moshe Safdie.
I’ve been trying out a couple of new web browsers and moving my newsletter subscriptions to different email addresses. The I-am-not-a-robot gauntlet has been brutal.
Link and ephemera Friday 8.1.2025
✪ “I’m reading the scriptwriters' guide for [Star Trek] TOS and it’s cracking me up in many places. It’s so obvious that, from the very beginning, they were already aware of so many of the issues people complain about today.” tumblr.com
✪ “Sanitation and custodial workers deserve far more money and respect than they generally get.” tumblr.com
✪ “Things you will see on a road trip across america…. if anyone ever wonders why i love america so much despite its many political and cultural flaws, this is why. this post explains it perfectly.” tumblr.com
✪ The TSA likes facial recognition at airports. Passengers and politicians, not so much. theregister.com. A facial database of millions of citizens is a terrible weapon for an autocratic regime, which is what the U.S. is now for many people and fast on its way to becoming for everyone.
✪ Slave camps used to run online scams are tied up in the Cambodia-Thailand border conflict. “… the scam center industry in Cambodia is estimated to generate over $12.5 billion annually – in other words, around half the country’s GDP,” says Angela Suriyasenee, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) think tank. theregister.com
✪ Not the Onion: ICE arrested a carpenter named Jesus. Jesus Teran is here in this country legally, and he was arrested after checking in for an ICE appointment. “‘He’s been faithfully appearing at ICE appointments for more than four years, he was following the protocols of ICE, he was complying with everything he’s supposed to do. All of a sudden, he’s detained,’ said the Rev. Jay Donahue, senior parochial vicar at St. Oscar Romero Parish.” jwz.org
✪ Atomic Keyboard is doing a Kickstarter to replicate the Macrodata Refinement Keyboard from Severance. “For Work That’s Mysterious and Important.” kickstarter.com. Via jwz.org.
✪ “if i had a william dollars, i would make a game where you play a courier in a pre-industrial setting, carrying parcels to various places on a route. and the game would start with your first day on the job, getting your map and your camping supplies and your first day’s advance pay, and then your boss goes okay let’s get you your mule. and you go to the stables and you meet your mule. and it’s like, okay, standard video game mount, you know how this works. you press a to pet the mule. the mule does not allow you to pet it. the mule attempts to bite you.” tumblr.com
✪ American Nazification: ICE put a double-amputee in solitary confinement after he refused to get into his cell because it had an inch of water and he couldn’t get his prosthetic legs wet. Rodney Taylor, born in Liberia, is in the U.S. legally. theguardian.com
✪ Hamas Wants Gaza to Starve. theatlantic.com. Hamas and Israel are partners in genocide.
✪ Curate your own newspaper with RSS. By Molly White. citationneeded.news. I love RSS. I have used RSS readers multiple time daily for more than 20 years. One of the first things I do when I get to my desk, while I’m eating breakfast and even before coffee, is check my RSS reader.
Stocking up on fireworks for the 4th of July. (Nat Farbman. 1954)
Woman with spotted dress and elaborate curled hair, Jersey (UK), 1864
Links and ephemera Thursday 7.31.2025
Do These Genes Make My Ad Look Racist? nytimes.com. When, if ever, do terms that have been associated with racism lose their racist connotations? By John McWhorter.
“It’s spring, which means it’s ruffed grouse season, which means I wake up every morning to a tiny feathered Harley Davidson revving up outside” tumblr.com
Veronica is sick and tired of Archie quoting Jordan Peterson
One day when I was in the third grade, our music teacher, Mrs. Lafayette, had the class compose a song together. Words and music. It was only about 10 seconds and it went like this:
“Early in the morning
Standing by the road
I jumped when I saw a little toad.”
(Then two more lines here with the same beats as the first two. I don’t remember those lines now.)
“Then I caught him nibbling at my sock.”
55 years later, sometimes I catch myself singing that stupid song, inaudibly, under my breath.
I use an app called Lose It to track calories, and I have cottage cheese with lunch nearly every day. I bought a different brand than usual recently, and Lose It lists it as “cootage cheese.” This amuses me to an unreasonable degree.
Cootage cheese.
Link and ephemera Wednesday 7.30.2025
FCC To Install A ‘Bias Monitor’ At New CBS To Ensure Network Kisses Trump’s Ass. techdirt.com. Stealing a page from the USSR playbook by installing a political officer to ensure that nothing is published or aired that offends the ruling party.
Princess Diana shakes hands with an AIDS patient without gloves, 1991
Not everyone enjoys firecrackers on the 4th of July. (Nat Farbman. 1954).
Automobile and foot traffic come to a complete halt in rainy Times Square as President Roosevelt delivers a speech, July 4, 1941. The president spoke via radio from the library at his home in Hyde Park, N.Y. Photo: Tom Sande for the AP. Via
Cloud-native becomes telcos’ new baseline after supplier upheavals. fierce-network.com Recent industry M&A shook the virtualization market and pushed telcos to rethink their infrastructure strategies. Find out how telcos are adapting and thriving in our latest Fierce Network research report. My latest on Fierce Network.
Links and ephemera Tuesday 7.29.2025
✪ “Never share a foxhole with a character who carries a photo of his sweetheart.” Roger Ebert’s Glossary of Movie Terms. greaterandgrander.com
✪ Cory Doctorow reviews Daniel de Visé’s “The Blues Brothers,” a book about the making of the movie, its influence in popular culture and the lives of Belushi and Aykroyd. “This isn’t a book about a movie; it’s a rich and engrossing tale of an extraordinary creative collaboration that found an unlikely foothold at just the right time and place.” pluralistic.net — I had no idea Cory is a “Blues Brothers” superfan. I love the movie too. Time to see it again!
✪ “Usually south park’s relevancy feels very fake and surface level to me, but it’s really something how trump and his base are actually, visibly much more enraged by this than they’ve been about any other criticism, any other show, any other enemy I’ve seen in the entire near-decade of his political career.” tumblr.com — My gut feeling, in the absence of evidence, is that MAGA sees “South Park” as their own and therefore sees this episode as a betrayal.
✪ How the Grateful Dead built the internet. Deadheads and lyricist John Perry Barlow helped build the WELL, a pioneering online forum, and Barlow founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). bbc.com
✪ A little something to take the edge off. tumblr.com
✪ Ghislaine Maxwell is pleading with the Supreme Court and Trump to intervene in her criminal case. thehill.com — I am enjoying great schadenfreude for all parties.
✪ RIP Tom Lehrer, musical satirist and mathematician. nytimes.com — He only performed and recorded music for a few years, devoting most of his professional life to mathematics. “His music was ultimately just a momentary detour in an academic career that included teaching posts at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, and even a stint with the Atomic Energy Commission.”
✪ How twiddling enshittifies your brain. pluralistic.net — Cory Doctorow: Online services like Google Search become “cognitive prostheses,” and when they enshittify, it makes us stupider. “The more useful and important a service becomes to you, the more the service’s proprietors can extract from you. They don’t care if you hate them, so long as you love the utility you get from the service.” Also: Moral panics about pocket calculators and literacy, Gen Z’s inability to read analog clocks, blogging as a cognitive prosthesis, a San Francisco man who got locked out of his Google account when the algorithm stupidly tagged a legitimate photo of his child as kiddie porn and how AI trickery keeps tech companies' stock prices artificially inflated.
Related: On recent trips to London and Copenhagen, we relied on Google Maps to navigate and we were able to move around like natives.
Even when I’m home, I rely on GPS (at home, I prefer Apple Maps), even for places I go to frequently. Why bother storing directions in my brain when I can keep them in my pocket?
✪ The South Park thing. “… if this episode made Cheeto Mussolini throw his ketchup at the wall, I’ll take it.” jwz.org
✪ “Bagpipes drowning out Trump as he’s speaking. Can we make this a thing everywhere he goes” bsky.app
✪ Trump Threatens To Withhold Billions From States That Try To Make Broadband Affordable To Poor People techdirt.com
✪ It turns out there’s a right and wrong way to pee. washingtonpost.com — Something else for me to feel performance anxiety about!
Volkswagen Beetle parked on a street in San Francisco, 1970
Lady wearing dark ball gown with lace bolero, dark gloves and a fan, 1880.
Elton John’s giant Pinball Wizard boots from the movie “Tommy.”
Currently reading: The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World by Harry Harrison 📚
Links and ephemera for Monday, 7.28.2025
✪ The Department of Homeland Security is tweeting Nazi propaganda. msn.com
✪ Passkeys won’t be ready for primetime until Google and other companies fix this zdnet.com — I don’t use Passkeys. I don’t quite understand them. I researched them when they first started hitting the mainstream, but have since forgotten what I’ve learned. I fear I could be locked out of my accounts if Apple and/or Google take a dislike to me. Passwords and 2FA are faulty, but they’re devils I am familiar with.
✪ How chat-based LLMs replicate the methods of a psychic con. softwarecrisis.dev
✪ This little boy is why we need live music in public spaces.
✪ Anthony Bourdain on In-N-Out: “My Favorite Restaurant in L.A.” youtu.be. I like, but do not love, In-N-Out.
…Join star fleet they said…It’ll be an adventure they said…
One Day in Metropolis (MAD #226, October 1981). Artist: Don Martin
I had an actual, legitimate wrong-number text just now, followed by a phone call. They weren’t trying to get me to invest in crypto or a pump-and-dump meme stock. They were just trying to reach somebody else and got me instead.
What a refreshing novelty.
I went to Comic-Con yesterday. Here are some photos
More precisely, I went near Comic-Con. I didn’t get tickets. But that’s OK — Comic-Con takes over all of downtown. I like to ride the Trolley in, walk around, people-watch, take photos, look at all the wild decorations and themed attractions studios put up to advertise the big movies and TV shows. I like to rack up the steps. I did 23,000 steps yesterday. A friend came down from Orange County, and it was delightful to see him.
I’m on my way, looking dapper, if I do say so myself, wearing a tasteful shirt.
This is not a Comic-Con photo. It’s just a nice scenic photo of the San Diego embarcadero.
Another scenic San Diego photo.
In past years, there used to be a couple of dozen of these guys hanging out at the trolley stop. Now I only saw two or three scattered around. We used to be a country, I tell ya.
Dozens of downtown skyscrapers are wrapped to advertise TV and movies. This is just one example.
At first glance, I thought this gentleman, who I saw on the Trolley ride home, was cosplaying. Upon further scrutiny, I think he is just exquisitely fashionable.
Links for today Saturday 7.26.2025
✪ “Resident Alien,” one of our favorite TV shows, is canceled. Son of a bitch! This is some bullshit! deadline.com
✪ Today I learned Ron Goulart wrote a series of mystery novels featuring Groucho Marx as a detective. en.wikipedia.org
✪ “The head of the main UN agency serving Palestinians has said his frontline staff are fainting from hunger, as the number of people dying of starvation in Gaza continued to rise and hopes for a ceasefire faded as negotiations collapsed.” theguardian.com
✪ “A group of far-right Israeli politicians and settlers met in parliament this week to discuss a plan to displace Palestinians from Gaza, annex the territory and turn it into a hi-tech, luxury resort city for Israelis.… Michael Sfard, one of Israel’s leading human rights lawyers, said: ‘This is a plan for ethnic cleansing. Under international law, this would amount to a crime against humanity because deportation is a war crime when committed on a small scale and a crime against humanity when it is committed on a massive scale.'” theguardian.com
✪ “Venezuelan men who were deported by the US to a notorious prison in El Salvador without due process are speaking out about treatment they described as ‘hell’ and like a ‘horror movie’, after arriving back home.” theguardian.com
✪ Immigration agents told a teenage US citizen: ‘You’ve got no rights.’ He secretly recorded his brutal arrest theguardian.com
✪ JD Vance Claims One of Our Worst Traditions as His Own. By Jamelle Bouie. nytimes.com Vance echoes the principles of the Dred Scott decision, which declared that Black people were an inferior race who could never be US citizens.
✪ White House Slams ‘South Park’ After Unflattering Depiction of Trump. hollywoodreporter.com The South Park episode includes a realistic, AI-generated image of a naked Trump showing his micropenis. youtu.be
✪ Ghislaine Maxwell Can’t Help But Notice Interview Room Covered In Plastic Sheeting. theonion.com
✪ Today’s labor market is “less like a ladder, more like a slot machine,” resulting in “zero-sum logic” that is poisoning society, writes Kayla Scanlon. kyla.substack.com
In 1957, the Soviet launch of Sputnik triggered a huge US response. It led to 3x funding for science education, created NASA and DARPA, and created massive investment in talent and infrastructure (and optimism). The US looked at a challenge and said: We can build our way out of this.
As economist Alex Tabarrok pointed out in his piece about the Sputnik moment, that kind of mobilization didn’t happen in 2024 when China’s DeepSeek AI surpassed OpenAI’s GPT-4. The US retreated instead of rallying. We looked at a challenge and say: They must be stealing from us.
This is a shift in how we understand problems and solutions. As Alex highlighted, research shows we’re developing what economists call zero-sum thinking, or the belief that my success requires your failure, that wealth and opportunity are fixed pies to be divided rather than expanded. As Alex explains, zero-sum thinkers “see society as unjust, distrust their fellow citizens and societal institutions, espouse more populist attitudes, and disengage from potentially beneficial interactions.” It’s a form of despair that arises during times of economic uncertainty.”
As Scanlon notes: This is reversible.
✪ The Seeds of Democratic Revival Have Already Been Sown. nytimes.com — I love nearly all of this article — but I am deeply troubled by suggestions we should fail to support our LGBTQ fellow Americans.
✪ “You think you’re the coolest guy in the parking lot and then this guy shows up.” “This guy” being a cat. tiktok.com
✪ Skittles gets a hat. tumblr.com
✪ Prepare Batcopter for immediate takeoff. tumblr.com
✪ By the way, is there anyone onboard who knows how to fly a plane? tumblr.com
"The Stainless Steel Rat" is the GOAT nickname for a fictional hero
He was the hero of the Stainless Steel Rat books by Harry Harrison. His full name is James Bolivar diGriz, aka “Slippery Jim diGriz.” Also good names. Harrison had a good ear for how names sound.
I loved those novels when I was a kid.
I also loved Harrison’s “Deathworld” novel series, whose hero also had a pretty good name — Jason dinAlt.
On the other hand, “Jake Cardigan” is a ridiculous name. He was the hero of the Tekwar novels and TV series, created by William Shatner. Ron Goulart ghostwrote the books.
