Mitch's Blog

Marco Rubio orders the State Department to return to using the Times New Roman font because the previous official font, Calibri, is “wasteful DEIA.” This is a small step in the MAGA eugenics program. They don’t just hate brown people; they also want to eradicate anyone else they’ve decided is genetically inferior, such as disabled people — in this case, people with reading disabilities, who find sans serif fonts easier to read.

As humanoid robots enter the mainstream, security pros flag the risk of botnets on legs.

A woman in the UK who suffers from schizophrenia thought her refrigerator was trying to communicate with her and she hospitalized herself. Turns out the message was an ad for the TV show “Plur1bus.” The message read “WE’RE SORRY WE UPSET YOU CAROL,” in creepy black letters on a yellow background.

The schizophrenic woman is named Carol, which is also the name of the main character of “Pluribus.”

Even a person without mental illness would be alarmed if that person was named Carol and their refrigerator sent them a creepy message using their name. This was a bad decision for an ad.

UPDATE: The only evidence I’ve been able to find for this is a single Reddit post. I’m going to hypothesize that this is a hoax, unless I see some other evidence.

I finished drinking coffee a half hour ago at 5:30 PM. I’m sure I will not regret this at three in the morning.

When you watch movies or long TV episodes at home, do you break them up over a few nights?

Cities in Flight: James Blish’s Overlooked Classic. I love these books.

The AI bubble isn’t new — Karl Marx explained the mechanisms behind it nearly 150 years ago. The theory of “surplus capital” explains the AI bubble. When the inevitable crash comes, working people will suffer.

Tech billionaires have a dystopian goal of financializing the world. The rise of prediction markets are a big part of that, says Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day:

Last month, Tarek Mansour, the co-founder of Kalshi, gave the audience at the Citadel Securities conference a chilling glimpse of where this is all headed (if we let it). “The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion,” he said on stage to a crowd of poor souls who, I guess, think that sounds dope.

Mansour’s “financialize everything” line is, in many ways, a condensed version of something Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a podcast last spring. A comment I come back to often because I believe he accidentally stated the fundamental driving philosophy of Big Tech. A perfect, succinct, unfathomably embarrassing snapshot of how a bunch of very wealthy losers view themselves:

“There’s this stat that I always think is crazy. The average American has three friends, three people they consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it’s like 15 friends or something,” he told podcast host Dwarkesh Patel, while talking about the rise of AI companions. “I think that there are all these things that are better about physical connections when you can have them, but the reality is that people just don’t have the connection and they feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like.”

Researcher Paul Fairie, on X at the time, had an even tighter summary of Zuckerberg’s worldview, “The average American has three eggs, but has demand for 15. So here are 12 photographs of eggs. I am a business man.”

The “here are 12 photographs of eggs” philosophy is everywhere you look. Not just at AI companies, but every large tech service. All of these platforms have inserted themselves into the cracks of modern life and want you to pay them — with your time, data, or actual money — for a hollow digital imitation of something we used to get from the other human beings in our lives. Or as X user r0sylns wrote recently, “Groceries? Get em delivered. Books? Buy em on amazon. Fuck libraries and bookstores. Stop buying CDs, vinyls, and DVDs, it’s all on the cloud! Movie theaters? Obsolete. Subscribe to 10 different platforms instead! Stay inside. Be afraid of your neighbors. Work til you die.”

“Create a problem. Take credit for trying to fix the problem you created. I wonder if FIFA gives a medal for that?"

Why We’re Paywalling Our Family Christmas Card . On McSweeney’s. I would 100% subscribe.

Elon Musk’s Blue Tick scam. The EU fines X $140 million for its deception over blue checkmarks. By Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr

America has identified its greatest enemy: Western Europe

Cisco: ‘Infrastructure debt’ drags down AI deployments. My latest on Fierce Network.

Chris Arnade walks Surrey, England. “A nostalgic theme park of managed decline.”

‘Ice batteries’ could heat up data center cooling. Cooling is a bottleneck for next-gen data centers. Nostromo Energy says ice — literal frozen water — can be part of the solution. My latest on Fierce Network.

On a whim, I bought a Godzilla T-shirt from Facebook and now Facebook thinks I want to replace my entire wardrobe with Godzilla- and Kaiju-themed apparel.

Maybe I do.

“Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What We Can Do About It,” is a playful book about a very serious topic. In a breezy 352 pages, author Cory Doctorow looks at how monopolization concentrates power in the hands of the few, erodes the middle class and makes the live of poor people more miserable and precarious.

“Enshittification” is a word coined by Doctorow in late 2022 to describe how tech platforms like Facebook, Google and Amazon captured monopolies.

Step one of enshittification is making things great for users. Remember how wonderful it was to connect with friends and family when you first got on Facebook? How miraculous Google search seemed the first time you used it? How amazing it was to find just the product you were looking for when you first used Amazon, and have that product delivered quickly and conveniently?

Step two is when platforms start degrading the experience for users to benefit business customers. Facebook shoves more and more ads and clickbait into its algorithmic feed. Google piles on the ads and makes its search steadily worse so you you have to dig deeper for what you’re looking for, and look at more ads as you do. Amazon deemphasizes the products you want and instead shows you search results for merchants who have paid to play.

The third and final stage of enshittification is when platforms make everybody miserable — both users and business customers — to benefit themselves and shareholders. Even many of the people who’d prefer to never use Facebook stay on because their kids' schools or medical support groups are there. Advertisers on Facebook and Google get steadily worsening returns on their investments but stay on because that’s where their customers are. Similar, both users and merchants are dissatisfied with Amazon, but neither group leaves because they’re stuck with each other.

I should pause here for a disclaimer: Cory and I are friends and I’ve been a fan of his writing and work since even before he even turned pro — since he was a precocious teen-ager and he and I both used the same online communities around 1990. But if you don’t believe me about how good “Enshittification” is, you can find plenty of other positive reviews online.

How it happened and why it matters

Over the course of the book, Cory documents how big platforms resort to fraud and regulatory capture to maintain their monopolies. He describes how enshittification is not just inconvenient — it erodes the incomes and working conditions of working people. And it’s not limited to the Internet. Amazon warehouse workers toil in sweltering temperatures and suffer high rates of injury, while delivery drivers pee in bottles because their brutal delivery schedules don’t give them time for bathroom breaks. Uber algorithms keep driver pay low. Nurses are forced to bid on work, competing with each other to drive their wages ever lower and lower, while the software that manages the bidding also monitors nurses' credit scores, to take advantage of nurses who are desperate because they have high debt.

Monopoly concentration enables fascism. The U.S. realized after World War II that German monopolies enabled the Nazis, and that realization helped drive anti-monopoly regulation that American Presidents beginning with Carter have torn down. The marriage of monopoly with fascism continues as American CEOs kiss Trump’s ring and donate lavishly to fund the White House Epstein ballroom.

About the word “enshittification” — yes it’s vulgar, and even silly. But that makes it more powerful. It’s a little naughty and fun to say, and it ties together social movements that otherwise wouldn’t have anything in common. Those sorts of alliances have historical precedent: Doctorow cites the example of the ecology movement taking off when people who cared about the ozone layer and owls realized they were in the same fight. And anti-enshittification, like ecology, can bring together unlikely allies — the Environmental Protection Agency was founded, not under Kennedy or Johnson or another Democrat, but under Richard Nixon.

The book ends hopefully. Enshittification can be stopped by tearing down the regulatory protections that prop it up. The Biden administration was an enthusiastic anti-enshittifier and the Trump administration has, surprisingly, shown the will to continue doing some of that. Trump is operating from corrupt motives — he will use monopoly regulation to punish his enemies while giving his allies a free pass — but good can flower from this bad seed. And Trump’s alienation of U.S. allies around the world encourages other countries to spin up industries competing with American monopolies, benefiting everyone — including Americans.

Get the book here: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

At a Cabinet meeting today, drunken Fox News host Pete Hegseth bragged about committing war crimes and lavishly praised convicted felon, sexual predator, pedophile and bribe-receiver Donald J. Trump, who rambled incoherently about the Epstein ballroom, bathroom tiles, the 2020 election and Biden.

Manton Reece @manton has some thoughts on Mastodon: Mastodon CEO change, 2026 reset

I’ve noted a drastic decline in activity in my Mastodon timeline. The people I follow just aren’t posting as much as they formerly did. I’ll sit and scroll the Mastodon timeline for a few minutes and discover to my surprise that I’ve scrolled back through 12 hours.

Of the three Twitterlike services, Bluesky and Threads are far more active for me.

On the other hand, I get far more activity on my posts on Mastodon than I do on Bluesky and Threads — more replies, likes and reblogs. I think it’s because at least two very popular Masto users follow me and occasionally boost my posts, which has helped me attract more followers there. I have 1,100 Mastodon followers, compared with 677 on Bluesky and 285 on Threads.

However, I get most of the activity on my posts on Facebook, with Tumblr a solid second place. Masto is third, Bluesky and Threads a distant fourth and fifth and mitchwagner.com gets hardly any activity at all, and I do it because I just like blogging.

I really want Mastodon to succeed. I like the philosophy, and I like that the platform permits posts of any length (if you choose an instance configured that way). I can’t stand being locked into a 300- or 500-character box.

I hope new management breathes new life into Mastodon. As Cory Doctorow points out, the reason that Bluesky and Threads take off isn’t because proprietary platforms are inherently superior to open source — it’s because those two platforms have much more money than Mastodon does.

It frustrates me that Mastodon and Bluesky insist on being separate silos. They need to get it together and become one thing. Arguing over AT protocol vs. ActivityPub is foolish.

A recent interview with political activist Srđa Popović, a leader of the movement that overthrew Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević in 2000, is heartening to anybody who fears civil war in the U.S.

And the threat is real. The Trump government deploys ICE raids against peaceful U.S. residents and citizens. It deploys the military against people it claims, without evidence, are narcoterrorists. Trump supporters staged an unsuccessful violent insurrection against Congress Jan. 6, 2021. A large minority of young Republican political staffers in Washington D.C. express Nazi views.

American citizens are getting fed up — what happens when they fight back?

I’m not quite old enough to remember the riots in U.S. cities in the 1960s, and hundreds of domestic terrorist bombings in the 1970s. Of course I do remember the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

To be clear, I am not advocating violent resistance. I fear it, both for myself and for the country I love. Violence inevitably creates suffering and misery.

Forunately, Popović spells out another solution, how tyrants can be deposed without resorting to violence. Indeed, nonviolent revolutions are more effective than their bloody alternatives, Popović said.

Research at Harvard confirms the greater effectiveness of nonviolent resistance compared with violence.

Popović appeared on the Revolution.social podcast, hosted by Rabble, aka Evan Henshaw-Plath, Twitter’s first employee. Watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

“Leaders need to figure out that democracy is like love,” Popović said. “You need to make it every day. This is not something that is given to you [that should be taken] for granted. You need to participate daily in keeping your governments accountable, from the level of President to the level of the school.”

After Milošević’s fall, Popović briefly pursued a career in Serbian politics, and then established the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) in 2003. “CANVAS has worked with pro-democracy activists from more than 50 countries, promoting the use of non-violent resistance in achieving political and social goals,” according to Wikipedia. In 2015, he co-authored: “Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Non-Violent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World."

The revolution against Milošević’s operated in the late 1990s, the era before social media, when revolutionary social movements communicated by putting up fliers, going on the radio, setting up pirate radio stations and organizing in the streets, like Tahrir Square in Egypt and Occupy Wall Street. But since then Popović has studied how to use social media and other modern tools to facilitate movements.

Popović’s expertise isn’t limited to revolutions. He discusses tools to facilitate any kind of social change — preserving democracy, open societies and resisting the rise of authoritarianism.

Popović’s origin story

Speaking slowly in a beautiful baritone, with a delightful Central European accent, Popović gives his personal history, and the recent history of Serbia. He said he grew up in “a beautiful country called Yugoslavia,” which later split into six countries in a civil war, including Serbia.

Popović has a dry, deadpan sense of humor. He delivers jokes matter-of-factly.

“At the age of 17, I thought the activism is for old ladies fighting for the dog’s rights, or something very exotic.” Instead, he studied biology and played bass guitar in a rock band he describes as “the pathetic version of Sisters of Mercy.”

He became an accidental activist, like most of the people he has met during his activist career.

Milošević came to power in 1989 and wrecked the country, bringing 100% hyperinflation in a single day. Popović joined a resistance movement that eventually led to Milošević’s ouster.

The revolution is chronicled in a documentary, “Bringing Down a Dictator," available for free in 36 languages, courtesy of a wealthy benefactor.

How do nonviolent social movements succeed?

Situations everywhere are different. Fighting a corrupt school board in Nashville, Tennessee, is different from fighting the Iranian regime. but the principles and tools are very similar, Popović said.

First, movements need a plan, a vision for not just overthrowing the dictator but how to establish democracy. Otherwise, you end up like Egypt, which successfully ousted Hosni Mubarak, who was replaced by an even more repressive government, Popović said.

“You need to know what you want first. Instead of just being pissed off with how the situation is, you need to formulate the change, which is called the vision of tomorrow,” Popović said.

Vision is where the Democratic Party today falls short. When the day comes that we oust the Republican Party from national dominance and Democrats control all three branches of government … then what? Do we just put the corporate Democrats back in power and roll things back to where they were in 2024? Do we institute universal healthcare, free public education, a national minimum wage, a jobs guarantee and robust industrial policy? Being anti-Trump is necessary for victory, but it’s nowhere near enough.

Additionally, you need a strategy for staying nonviolent.

“Nonviolent discipline is one of the of the key elements of success of these movements. Nonviolent movements are twice more likely, historically, to succeed than those that are throwing molotovs,” Popović said.

Successful movements need unity between different groups. “That very often means talking to the people you disagree with,” Popović said. Successful movements were unlikely coalitions of weird partners, The suffragette movement, which won women the right to vote in the U.S., included radical feminists, but also conservative church women who were trying to stop their husbands from drinking,

“They had this weird coalition between conservative churches and liberal woman that decided together they had a mutual interest that gave them the vote,” Popović said.

Polish liberation from the Soviet Union was led by blue-collar shipyard workers, allied with urban intelligentsia and the Roman Catholic Church — not really the kinds of people you’d expect to have beers together, Popović said.

“The key here is, if you want to be successful, you need to move into [the] mainstream. Take a look at the environmental movement. It started as a bunch of hippies tying themselves to the fences of military bases in [the] 60s. It ended up with the Environmental Protection Agency,” Popović said.

He added, “Like football — which Americans wrongly call ‘soccer’ — you want to control the middle field.”

Social media is not enough

That’s where social media comes in, because people spend a lot of time online. But it’s only “the tip of the iceberg,” Popović said.

Social media have made political movements today different from decades past. Today, they coalesce around trigger events, like the death of George Floyd, Popović said.

Movements need to win support from institutions — which Popović calls “pillars.” The Martin Luther King Jr.-led bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, worked because it cost bus companies money. Black people were far more likely to ride buses than whites — bus companies depended on their business. Pressuring politicians failed to defeat segregation because racist politicians knew they could continue to get elected. Pressuring business worked because racist business owners cared more about making money than about white supremacy.

“You don’t have to convince the business community or the bus owners that they should no longer believe in segregation. You just have to make the cost of segregation higher than the cost of keeping it going,” Popović said.

Social movements need to focus on issues that voters care about. Harvey Milk was a San Francisco politician who was a pioneering hero for gay and lesbian rights — but he didn’t run for office on those issues; he ran by looking respectable and promising to stop people leaving dog poop on the ground. Because nobody wants to step in dog poop, no matter what their sexual orientation or political beliefs.

“He didn’t abandon his queerness or anything else, no — but he figured out what the leverage points were,” Popović said.

Getting security forces onboard

Getting support from the police and military is another important step. “One of the final things that happens is that when a regime collapses, the police and military say, ‘I’m not going to do this anymore,'” The Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria was one of the most powerful regimes in the world and it collapsed abruptly, because the police just stopped believing.

Today’s autocratic regimes succeed by making people apathetic, atomizing people, and persuading people there is nothing worth fighting for. Vladimir Putin doesn’t convince people that Russia is a paradise, he just needs to persuade people that democracy doesn’t work and democracies are just as bad as Russia and everything is controlled by conspiracies and the Deep State, Popović said.

Intriguingly, Popović is an advocate of Bitcoin, cryptocurrency and blockchain. I need to think more about that — until now, I have thought of Bitcioon and crypto as a massive scam, useful only for financial speculation, bribery and crime. But Popović points out that crypto can be effective in circumventing authoritarian control of financial institutions, which control is used to stifle opposition movements by depriving them of funds and access to banking. Bitcoin moves money into Burma and exile societies in Thailand, he said, also noting the potential of open sources and blockchain to ensure free and fair elections.

Popović, who now lives in Colorado, talks about how democracy and social change applies to local movements, like schools and roads.

Humor is a powerful tool for social change.

Humor comes naturally to Serbs, Popović said. For example, when Serbia was obsessed wth a solar eclipse, the resistance there built a giant cardboard telescope that it carried through the streets, and when you looked in the end you saw a picture of Milošević’s head as a falling star.

The telescope “was four meters long, it was hell to carry and it was looking like it was made by an 11-year-old,” Popović said. But hundreds of people lined up to look through the telescope, and the stunt attracted coverage from international news media. “It’s so photogenic, and if you’re a journalist, this is what you want,” Popović said.

In another act of civil disobedience, an artist built a barrel with Milošević’s face on it, and they put it in the main shopping district, and let passers-by deposit coins to get baseball bats to hit the barrel. Within fifteen minutes, 200 people lined up with their shopping bags to play the game. Police got the order to stop it, but there wasn’t anything to do other than arrest shoppers.

Popović calls this “dilemna activism,” becasuse it puts the regime in a dilemma. If they let the activism go, they look weak, and if they crack down, they look stupid. And cracking down on comic protests deflates police morale; they signed up to protect and serve, not to arrest shoppers whacking at a barrel with a baseball bat like at a carnival game.

“Humor breaks fear,” and it also breaks apathy, Popović said.

For more on the power of humor to defeat dictators, Popović recommends a free book, “Pranksters vs. Autocrats”

And finally, resistance movements need to look cool.

“The last thing: one of the reasons when movements become successful is when they become cool. Everybody wants to be around the cool people. Everybody wants to be part of something cool. What’s more cool than using humor?” Popović said.

My colleague Monica Alleven landed an interview with Justen Burdette, the embattled CEO of Hawaiian mobile operator Mobi. He disputes charges that he fled the United States to Brazil. He is, in fact, in Canada, where he has previously lived, he told Monica.

A fun article about “mansplaining” and other neologisms. Not to be taken too seriously.

The EU’s top Meta regulator is “contractually prohibited from hurting Meta’s feelings." She signed a nondisparagement clause prohibiting her from saying bad things about Meta — prohibiting her from doing her new job — and she has piles of Meta stock options. By Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr

If we were rich, I’d absolutely buy this beautiful real-time New York subway clock, so I’d have precise knowledge of the schedule of a transit system 3,900 miles from our house. (Thanks, @pluralistic@mamot.fr.)

Neal Stephenson has a newsletter. Great! (And thanks, @pluralistic@mamot.fr for linking to it.)

It doesn’t look good for Hawaiian mobile network operator Mobi. Customers are complaining on Reddit that they’ve been disconnected and stranded, and CEO Justen Burdette reportedly flew the coop for Brazil. A lawsuit filed against Burdette alleges that he didn’t pay $1 million in employee wages, among other things. My colleague Monica Alleven reports on Fierce Network.

Cisco reports a rebound in service provider spending driven by network refreshes and growing demand for AI and data center connectivity. My latest on Fierce Network.

The Trump administration is replacing American democracy with a kleptocracy, a system of corruption in which a network of ruling elites use the institutions of government to steal public assets for their own private gain….

It is the system Russia’s president Vladimir Putin exploits in Russia, and President Donald J. Trump is working to establish it in the United States of America.

“The Trumps’ most natural allies,” [writes Tom Burgis of The Guardian], “first in business, now also in politics—have long been the rulers of the Gulf’s petro-monarchies, who see no distinction between their states’ interests and their families.'”

— Heather Cox Richardson:

Current examples of Trump kleptocracy: Trump’s plan to ally with Russia and force Ukraine to surrender, funneling billions of dollars of Russian natural resources and sweetheart deals to favored Russian and U.S. businessmen; White House advisor David Sacks negotiating sweetheart deals for Silicon Valley companies; U.S. policies promoting Trump family business; the sale of public office to Trump donors.

Also, Trump commuted the sentence of David Gentile, convicted of defrauding 10,000 investors out of $1.6 billion. “According to Kenneth P. Vogel of the New York Times, prosecutors said the victims were small business owners, teachers, nurses, farmers, and veterans: ‘hardworking, everyday people.’ ‘I lost my whole life savings,” one victim wrote about his losses. “I am living from check to check.'”

There’s a new name for the new oligarchs: The Epstein Class. Trump used to call those people “the swamp” and now he is their champion.

I changed the domain for this blog. The old domain redirects to the new domain so if you’re following this blog you don’t have to make any changes to your bookmarks, RSS feeds or email.

I started this blog using the domain mitchw.blog in late 2022, when I switched from Wordpress to Micro.blog. I didn’t want to use my full name on social media because at that time I was working for a company that was sensitive about being associated with potentially offensive speech. “Mitch” and “Wagner” were already taken on .com and .net and all other reasonable top-level domains, and I couldn’t think of anything cute that I liked, so I went with MitchW. I used the .blog top-level-domain because I was swept up in the fervor for the revival of good old-fashioned blogging.

I quickly got tired of that domain, but couldn’t be bothered to change it. I couldn’t think of anything I liked better. And I couldn’t even figure out why I didn’t like the domain mitchw.blog.

I had an insight recently, from a throwaway comment John Gruber made on his podcast The Talk Show (I think it was this episode with Stephen Robles): He said he doesn’t like the word “blog.” And I realized I don’t like the word either. I love blogging, but I don’t like the word “blog.”

Also, I don’t ever think of myself as “MitchW.” I think of myself as Mitch, Mitch Wagner and could even go with a Wagner domain name if it was available (which is was not).

I already owned mitchwagner.com, so I changed the blog domain to that. I followed these instructions. In my case, I already had a website hosted at that domain at Micro.blog, and so I didn’t have to mess with DNS settings; I just had to follow the instructions at the preceding link to point the domain to my blog instead of to my other website.

The whole thing took just a few minutes and was no trouble at all.

In addition to the blog, I had used mitchw.blog as my handle on Bluesky. I changed that to mitchwagner as well. This broke all the links to my previous Bluesky posts, but I don’t care about that.

Then I changed my ActivityPub username to @mitch@mitchwagner.com. Now, I can better take advantage of a feature of Micro.blog where I can read and reply to Mastodon and Bluesky responses from the Micro.blog timeline; people on both those services will see responses as coming from names extremely similar to the ones I use on those respective services (though not identical, they’re close enough).

And speaking of domain names: Twenty-some years ago, I saw a woman named Micki Krimmel used the blog domain mickipedia.com. As soon as I saw, I thought, “That’s brilliant!” And “Damnit! I wish I’d thought of that!” I didn’t follow her lead and use the name Mitchipedia because it would seem like stealing. Finally, two years ago, I thought, “Why don’t I just ask her if she has a problem with it?” And she was gracious about the whole thing and I changed my tumblr handle to mitchipedia but stopped short of using it as my primary blog domain because it seemed like too much of a commitment, like getting a tattoo (something else I once decided to do but then decided against it at the last minute and still have not followed through on). Also, the .com and .net domains were already taken and I grabbed .org but I feel like I’m not a .org. Yes, I overthink this kind of thing.

After comparison shopping, I now know that the best place to buy ice in the neighborhood is the liquor store a quarter mile from the house. Hopefully, our refrigerator will be repaired or replaced before I get a chance to form a relationship with the people who work there.

We are watching Pluribus. The premise is that everyone on earth has undergone a rapid, miraculous change in consciousness, and the show focuses on a single unpleasant, bitter alcoholic who was left behind. We are not exactly enjoying the show and yet we feel compelled to continue watching.

I really want to see what kind of world the transformed human race creates but instead we’re locked in on watching someone get drunk and binge-watch “Golden Girls.” That is literally what happens in the third episode. 🍿

Hamilton Nolan: Third parties on the U.S. national level are disastrous: “On the national level, and in particular concerning presidential elections, forming a third party tends to be counterproductive, because it has the effect of pulling votes away from the party closest to your beliefs and thereby helping the party most opposed to your own beliefs.” But a Labor Party can strike a crippling blow against Republicans in Red States that hate Democrats. How to Win Red States With a Labor Party

Michelin Honored the Cheesesteak. Not All Philadelphians Cheered. “In a Venn diagram of people deeply concerned about Michelin ratings and people deeply concerned about cheesesteaks, the overlap is not large.”

Why sex workers, kids and terrorists are the first to adopt new tech. “… these groups aren’t more (or less) temperamentally inclined to throw themselves into mastering new technologies. Rather, they have more reason to do so.” — Normie diffusion and technophilia, Cory Doctorow, @pluralistic@mamot.fr

Heather Cox Richardson: The Trump government surrenders to the Russians, betrays our European allies, commits war crimes and Trump posts messages of hate and terror for Thanksgiving.

As Trump’s popularity continues to drop, the MAGA coalition shows signs of cracking, and Trump’s mental acuity slips, there is a frantic feel to the administration, as if Trump’s people are trying to grab all they can, while they can.

Joel Stein defends the em-dash in the face of attacks by AI-haters. “It’s the breath marks of Emily Dickinson, the stream of consciousness of Virginia Woolf, the head-clogging maximalism of David Foster Wallace, the self-aggrandizing asides of Joel Stein.”

We Can’t Diet and Exercise Our Way Out of the Next Pandemic. ““In the event of a sudden pandemic, what should we do? This month, Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health, offered a remarkably blunt answer: nothing.” By David Wallace-Wells.

Our refrigerator is currently not keeping things cold. We have the refrigerator repair guy coming Monday, but there is the possibility it’s not just pining for the fjords and we now have an ex-refrigerator. If we need to replace the fridge, do you have a recommendation?

I’d like to see a good miniseries based on Roger Zelazny’s “Damnation Alley,” but I fear that the biker aesthetic might be seen as out-of-date. BIkers don’t have the same pop culture romance as they did in the 50s-80s. And people would think the show was a ripoff of “Escape From New York,” so the publicists would have to explain that the Zelazny came first.

There was a movie made of the story in the late 1970s, but it got terrible reviews and I have never seen it. The armored car in the movie lived on for years in a series of 1980s Amoco commercials.

I’d also like to see a miniseries based on Zelazny’s “Doorways in the Sand,” and of course a full-blown big-budget many-season series based on the “Chronicles of Amber.”

I’ve seen reports that George R.R. Martin is producing a series based on Zelazny’s “Roadmarks.” I’d love to see that, but I haven’t seen anything about it recently and I suspect it’s in limbo.

kthxbai

I thought this was a pretty cool show. I liked the idea of a sentient chimp as crew member, and I had a mad crush on the girl.

A look back at “Mallrats” on its 30th anniversary, including a big interview with Kevin Smith. By Katie Baker at The Ringer

“Mallrats” was Smith’s second movie, coming off “Clerks,” a low-budget indy which saw him hailed as a cinematic genius. “Mallrats” was a spectacular flop, and critics were now saying Smith was an idiot.

But “Mallrats” has lived on as a cult classic and fan favorite, and making the movie shaped both Smith’s career and his life. He met his wife, Jennifer Schwalbach-Smith, through a circuitous route as a result of making “Mallrats,” so (as he points out) their daughter owes her life to “Mallrats.”

Smith tells a story about how he had to flee his house during the recent Los Angeles wildfires:

Smith considers himself “a pack rat and a fuckin’ hoarder,” but on that day, he was holding only two things when he left the house with his wife and their dogs. The first was a small urn containing a portion of his father’s ashes.

“The other,” Smith says, “was my Silent Bob costume. Because I was like, Well, if everything burns down, I’m gonna have to work and shit.”

I wouldn’t say “Mallrats” is one of my favorite movies, but I have seen it two or three times and enjoyed it and — you know what? There aren’t many movies I’ve seen more than once so yeah I guess “Mallrats” is one of my favorite movies. I know the movie is loved by middle-schoolers, but if you’re reading this you’ve seen my posts and you know that a big piece of my sense of humor is stuck at age 13.

China has brought millions out of poverty. The US has not – by choice

Jamelle Bouie: The White House Gold Rush Is On. “If Trump’s first term was marked by a level of graft and self-dealing that would have embarrassed a Tammany stalwart, then his second term seems to be an explicit effort to outpace his previous record and set a new high-water mark for political corruption in the United States…. By any and every measure, in other words, Trump is the most corrupt person to ever sit in the Oval Office.”

America is becoming Dallas. Hamilton Nolan visits a megachurch. “Could we not have the love without the accompanying hate? The community, without the accompanying need to make our community an army ready to destroy all others?

“Kumbaya” is a pretty bad folk song but it does not deserve the abuse it’s taken.

We’re going to war with Venezuela for the same reasons we went to war with Iraq. Oil, the president is legit a bad man, and handwaving about terrorism. We risk the same outcome.

A main argument of Trump’s 2015 Presidential campaign, which helped get him elected, that the Iraq war was a stupid, bipartisan blunder. And he was right! It left us with a mess that we didn’t clean up for nearly 20 years. We’re still paying hundreds of billions of dollars per year for that fiasco. And yet Trump, the stupidest and most incompetent man who ever occupied the White House, says, “That was great! Let’s do it again!”

An ancient Roman epitaph for a dog.

I continued reading “Lord of the Rings” last night. Frodo and his hobbit scooby-gang have left Bree. We’re getting a lot more description of landscape and also talk of the Black Riders. That name did not age well. Strider recited an interminably long poem about an elf woman and human man who fell in love. She was immortal and she died. I think. I didn’t follow what I was reading too well; I was falling asleep by then. I started thinking that Carl Hiaasen had a new book out a few months ago and I would really like to read that. Then I decided to call it a night on LoTR and read something else, but I was too tired for that so we just watched a little TV and went to bed.

Karoline Leavitt says Trump calling a woman reporter “piggy” is an example of him being “respectful” and journalists should appreciate that.

I’m sure that she and her boss, the sexual predator, pedophile and convicted criminal Donald J. Trump, will find it respectful when I say that they’re despicable idiots and that they will appreciate it.

I recently resolved to stop keeping empty boxes and to throw out the empty boxes that I already have.

But today I received shoes from Zappos — a box inside a box — and those boxes are too good to throw out. Sturdy, clean, regular and the perfect size for … something. I’ll figure it out.

Today in America’s rapid decline: Trump is literally threatening death to lawmakers who reminded serving military of their obligation to disobey unlawful orders. These lawmakers are themselves military veterans — Trump had a medical deferrment because, he claims, he had bonespurs.

The CDC changed its website to include lies about alleged vaccine dangers.

And the U.S. Coast Guard will no longer classify swastikas and nooses as hate symbols.

Amazon Prime is making a new Stargate series! Sweet!

Trump Praises Saudi Prince and Dismisses Question About Killing of Journalist

“You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that,” Mr. Trump told the journalist, Mary Bruce of ABC News, later referring to her query as “a horrible, insubordinate, and just a terrible question.”

KBS must have been uncomfortable about Mary Bruce’s question. You know who else was uncomfortable? Jamal Khashoggi, as he was being murdered and dismembered by Saudi agents.

Town’s Huge Christmas Mural Was Generated Using AI, Resulting in Ghastly Chthonic Horrors. “This mural has gone up in Kingston, ostensibly for Christmas but AI has ensured it’s actually to celebrate the return of our dark lord Cthulhu."

A 79-year-old man who was born in a refugee camp is doing hard time in Alligator Alcatraz after 70 years in the U.S. “He fell out of his wheelchair and they left him on the cell floor for hours.”

Here’s another photo of the borzoi dog I saw at the park the other day, caught in the act of shaking himself.

OpenAI is cutting off service to a toymaker after teddy bears started telling children how to play with matches and talking about sexual fetishes. Why didn’t I ever have cool toys like that when I was a kid?

Suddenly Frodo noticed that a strange-looking weather-beaten man, sitting in the shadows near the wall, was also listening intently to the hobbit-talk. He had a tall tankard in front of him, and was smoking a long-stemmed pipe curiously carved. His legs were stretched out before him, showing high boots of supple leather that fitted him well, but had seen much wear and were now caked with mud. A travel-stained cloak of heavy dark-green cloth was drawn close about him, and in spite of the heat of the room he wore a hood that overshadowed his face; but the gleam of his eyes could be seen as he watched the hobbits.

Here’s Strider. He is the coolest man in the Prancing Pony — faded Levi’s, biker boots and leather jacket, smoking unfiltered Camels. He is wearing aviator sunglasses inside the dark bar; on anybody else they’d look affected and silly but on him they make him look even cooler. He is played by 1980s Sam Elliott.

Also: I can’t get over that there’s a guy in Middle Earth named “Bob.”

Her name is “hippie,” and she was being walked by a lovely white-haired Russian woman with an accent straight out of a 1970s spy movie. Hippie came right up to me and stuck her nose on the treat pouch on my hip; the Russian woman explained that Hippie is NOT allowed to take treats from other people because Hippie is bred to run and she takes the dog to the off-leash dog beach and if the dog were allowed to accept treats from other people the dog would not run; the dog would just go from person to person begging dog treats.

Hippie stood about 3-1/2 feet high, with a skinny body, long legs and a long, thin snout.

The breed has an interesting history.

They were formerly known as Russian wolfhounds and the name describes their history — they were bred in 16th Century Russia to hunt wolves. For centuries, they could not be purchased but only given as gifts from the tsar, with whom the breed was popular.

The hobbits have arrived at the Prancing Pony, which I picture as like the Bada Bing in The Sopranos. “Paulie Walnuts” could be a hobbit name.

When I was a kid, I thought quicksand, evil twins and amnesia would be bigger deals than they turned out to be.

I had to re-learn to read books in 2023, after 20+ years of doing more and more of my reading on the Internet.

I don’t trust newfangled simultaneous collaborative editing tools. Two people editing the same doc at the same time? It’s witchcraft!

Or electricity. I don’t trust electricity.

The United States is in the moment after Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff, but before he looks down.

I keep getting spam at work with the subject line “EMPLOYEES FROM HELL.” I feel seen.

Ezra Klein: How Tucker Carlson is helping modern Nazis — “Groypers” — go mainstream in the Republican Party.

To call them Nazis is not hyperbole. These guys see Jews as enemies within America, and are not shy about saying so. No dog-whistling here.

We paid El Salvador to torture, abuse, and rape completely innocent Venezuelans so that [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio, [White House deputy chief of staff] Stephen Miller, and Donald Trump could claim they were tough on immigrants.

— Heather Cox Richardson

The economy is faltering and Americans know it.

Bloomberg reports that 62% of Americans they polled say the cost of everyday items has climbed over the past month and that 55% of employed Americans say they’re worried about losing their job. It also notes, as CNBC economic commenter Carl Quintanilla pointed out, that international stocks are outperforming the U.S. S&P stock index by the widest margin in 16 years. Yesterday the University of Michigan consumer confidence survey hit its lowest reading in 65 years.

— Heather Cox Richardson

Transforming a human necessity into an asset is a terrible idea. Governments work to increase the price of assets owned by actors in their economy. But increasing the price of housing only benefits the minority who own houses, while everyone else – everyone who needs a roof over their head – suffers. For a comparison, imagine if our governments instituted a policy of making some other necessity as expensive as possible, say, food or water. Transforming shelter into an asset class was always going to end badly.

— How to fix the UK housing crisis, by Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr

I have decided to make a drastic life change: I am throwing out all empty boxes, no matter how sturdy, clean and perfectly sized they are (with the exception of the original packaging for expensive electronics). I will trust in the universe to provide boxes when boxes are required.

Please pray for me during this difficult transition.

Here’s something I saw while walking the dog: The first lawn Santa of the season.

Here’s something I saw while walking the dog: The Goodyear Blimp

If Back to the Future was made today, Marty would be going back to 1995.

Reading “Lord of the Rings” continues. The scenes about the barrow-wights are pretty good. At least it’s not descriptions of eating or forests and Tom Bombadil doesn’t show up until the end.

The smallest hill I’m willing to die on: I dislike virtual backgrounds that are representations of rooms. Virtual rooms are all bland and dystopian. Just use the blur effect or an abstract virtual background. It is acceptable to use a virtual room or some other real-world image if it is very, very clever — but they never are.

I made a disparaging comment about Los Angeles to an angeleno on a team call, and the angeleno agreed. Angelenos are usually willing to agree heartily with any disparaging remark you make about Los Angeles. Makess needling them less fun.

I went on the San Diego subreddit to see if anyone can see the Northern Lights from here, and I fell down a rabbithole of reading a thread of people ranting about people who don’t pick up dog-poop on the sides of hiking trails. The original poster included photos to make their point. Why did you feel that was necessary, u/Adventurous_Yam_5?

I very nearly quit reading Lord of the Rings. I’m about 350 pages in and a third of that is description of forest. I don’t even like forest — we live very nearly in the desert. Another third of the book is description of food, and none of it is pizza or burritos. They just left Tom Bombadil’s cabin. Tom Bombadil is extremely annoying. He is the guy in “Animal House” who was playing the guitar and singing “I Gave My Love a Cherry” and John Belushi smashed his guitar.

But I will keep reading.

Hofstadter’s law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s law.

This has been much on my mind lately.

Sign of the changing seasons: Today is the first day since the spring that I’ve had to turn on the lights in my home office before dinner.

Chris Arnade walks the city of Zhengzhou, China, and shares his self-described “oversimplified take on all of China, which is that it’s the US, circa 1955 or so, but with the benefit of modern tech.”

The analogy isn’t perfect given the fundamental differences on the essential question of “what is a good life, and how do you obtain it but China has the energy, optimism, and trajectory that the US had then. This isn’t confined to only the narrow minority of the exceptionally fortunate, but rather is manifest across the whole economic bell curve, because the entire population is getting richer at velocities approaching ten percent a year, levels of growth that tend to make everyone giddy and forgiving of other issues. I’m not a rigid ideological materialist, but having your economy double roughly every decade absolves a lot of other sins, and tends to put smiles on people’s faces.

When I was doing my work in the US Rust Belt, talking to the elderly in decaying cities, one of the common laments I heard over and over was some variation of, “Back then, you could walk straight out of high school onto the factory floor, and build a good life. If you worked hard enough, played by the rules, you could get married, buy a house, raise a family, go on a few vacations a year, and see your kids and grandkids do better than you did. You can’t do that now, not without going away to get some fancy college degree that puts you so far in debt you might as well be chained to the bank.”

While the Chinese version differs–“playing by the rules” is more stringent, home is a tiny apartment in a forty-story tower, vacations are to Shanghai’s Disney World rather than Orlando–the trajectory remains intact. They can walk out of high school into the iPhone factory and build themselves a good life, certainly as measured against what their parents had, which is how optimism is forged, through comparison to local expectations.

Perhaps they looked at the harm that would be caused by a shutdown and decided to just kick the problem down the road. There were never going to be any good outcomes to this particular standoff.

The only good outcome is going to be voting the Trump government out of office and prosecuting its leaders to the fullest extent of the law. No clemency “for the good of national unity.” We did that with the Confederacy, Nixon and after Trump’s first term, and it has brought us 150 years of misery.

“Low skilled” workers are a myth. “[Minimum-wage jobs are] not low-skill. They simply require different skills, ones that not just anyone possesses.” The author, Rachel Moody, is half-right here. I’m not convinced that minimum-wage jobs are not low-skilled. But Moody is right that these jobs are important, and the workers are entitled to dignity and a living wage.

“Once I returned home, I realised the only things that had kept their value were the relationships and conversations I had had. Everything else seemed perishable.” I visited every country in the world without flying. Here are eight things I learned.

Chris Arnade walks Taipei and other parts of China, and reflects on the temples, materialism and pigeon keepers. “Six flights higher is where I found Mr. Li, an especially kind man, who like all pigeon keepers around the world, was giddy to meet someone else who loves the rats with wings.”

Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” became one of the biggest hits of 1976, “less than a year after the disaster it commemorates.” writes Neda Ulaby for NPR:

The Canadian musician had agonized over writing the song in the first place.

“He feared being inaccurate, corny or worse, appearing to exploit a tragedy for profit,” writes John U. Bacon in his new bestseller, The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald. “But more than that, as a fellow sailor and a child of the Great Lakes … this song – whatever it was – was deeply personal.”

…

“From 1875 to 1975, there were at least 6,000 commercial shipwrecks on the bottom of the Great Lakes,” Bacon told NPR. “So that is one shipwreck a week every week for a century. That is one casualty every day for a century.”

The Trump government says it will use the military against American civilians and is openly preparing to do it. They’re getting ready to steal the 2026 election. This is not some bullshit TikTok conspiracy theory; it’s happening in the open.

Trump’s domestic militia is growing. “The President repeatedly says he’ll use the military against American civilians and is creating special units to do so.”