Mitch's Blog

Two very stable geniuses say Thomas Jefferson enslaved people but didn’t support slavery (Boing Boing)

Nazis openly harass Jewish people in Desantis Land (Boing Boing)

Gov. DeSantis won’t condemn Florida Nazis, so Volusia sheriff steps in with message: “F*ck you!" (Boing Boing)

Native advocacy group to retire ‘Crying Indian’ anti-pollution ad (AP)

The Keep American Beautiful nonprofit is retiring the iconic “crying Indian” ad by transferring ownership of the rights to the National Congress of American Indians. Native Americans criticized and ridiculed the ad for perpetuating stereotypes.

The actor in the ad, Iron Eyes Cody, wasn’t even an Indian. He was Italian-American.

MAGA cultists advocate for Marxism to stop communist agenda (Boing Boing)

Prankster Walter Masterson easily gets MAGA and Qanon cultists to call for workers to collectivize and seize the means of production to stop socialism and communism.

The Horror of Realizing Everyone Can See Your Work Calendar Entries Naptime. Call Mom. Some employees are shocked to discover how much they are revealing; is this your first colonoscopy? (WSJ)

An enjoyable and informative article–but an odd one.

When I’ve been employed at companies with shared calendar servers, I have always assumed the details of my corporate calendar were open to my colleagues. If there’s an event I don’t want my colleagues to know the details about, I don’t put it on the calendar.

I keep a personal calendar for personal events. When I have to take time off work in the middle of the day for a personal reason, I just put a calendar event called “BLOCKED” on my corporate calendar, and put the details on my personal calendar.

Find out how third-place cloud platform Google is pursuing a multi-cloud strategy to grab market leadership.. My latest on Silverlinings

How ‘The Last of Us’ Cherishes a Bygone World. (By Shirley Li at The Atlantic)

The characters of “The Last of Us” are mourning for the world we live in, and the show helps us appreciate that we’re still living here.

You and I may think of shopping malls as suburban eyesores and monuments to kitsch, but that’s because we take them for granted.

Fans were over the moon for the third episode, featuring Nick Offerman. I thought it was good but not great. But this episode lived up to the hype.

The Case for a Primary Challenge to Joe Biden (By Mark Leibovich at The Atlantic)

Yes. Biden has been an excellent President—but that’s not good enough. The US needs better than excellence. We need a great President, a transformative President, a Roosevelt or Lincoln.

And Biden has failed in several ways as President. He has done a terrible job at Covid.

And has not done enough to break up the domination of big business in our national lives. Ask the people of East Palestine about that. Yeah, sure, Trump set the policy that allowed that disaster to happen—but the Biden administration has had plenty of time to fix that policy, and they didn’t. Indeed, during a showdown between labor and the railroad companies, Biden came down for the railroad companies.

And there’s the matter of his age. I’m staunchly anti-ageist—but Biden will be 82 when he’s sworn in for his next term. That’s old.

So let’s have a good primary competition and see if Biden is up for the rigors of a rough-and-tumble election, and his second term.

I’ll support whichever Democrat gets the nomination.

According to research, most adults feel 20% younger than their actual age.

This past Thanksgiving, I asked my mother how old she was in her head. She didn’t pause, didn’t look up, didn’t even ask me to repeat the question, which would have been natural, given that it was both syntactically awkward and a little odd. We were in my brother’s dining room, setting the table. My mother folded another napkin. “Forty-five,” she said.

She is 76.

— The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are, by Jennifer Senior at The Atlantic.

I’m conflicted about the premise of this article. It makes sense, but it also seems possibly ageist. Like being old is bad so we are in denial about our age and think we’re younger than we really are.

I’m 61. I don’t have a precise number for how old I am in my head, but 80% of 61 is 48, and that feels about right. I feel like I’m somewhere in the 36-52-year-old range. It helps that I’m healthy and fit.¹

As a number, 61 seems elderly to me, but I think that’s just my internal conditioning growing up. Internalized ageism. Rather than think of myself as being younger than I am, I try to redefine what my age means. It means whatever I want it to mean, and whatever my mind and body are capable of making it mean.

But that will only work for a while. Twenty-five years ago, I was about the same as I am today, only with a crappier phone. In 25 years, I will be an old man, and no amount of positive thinking will change that.