Newsom Vows to Stop Proposed Billionaire Tax in California. “It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.” — George Carlin
Why Vance Committed So Hard to the Minneapolis Shooter. “For MAGA America, ICE is an instrument for cleansing violence.”
I was kidnapped by idiots. An academic trip to Iraq unexpectedly turned into an immersive field study on the ways authoritarian regimes use brutality.
We're all just content for ICE
Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day:
During my four days in the Twin Cities, I watched the fabric of American society start to break down. ICE agents armed with assault weapons, tear gas, stun grenades, and pepper spray balls drive cars off the road and break down people’s doors with abandon. The institutions that are meant to protect us — local law enforcement, local politicians, the basic machinery of democracy and accountability — have all but thrown their hands up. “They have bigger guns than we do,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said during an interview over the weekend.
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ICE agents are, simply put, fucking clowns. According to The Atlantic, they receive 47 days of training — in honor of Trump, the 47th president, naturally. Many of them, also, can barely read or write, apparently. The ones I spent the weekend following around didn’t even have proper uniforms, with some wearing sneakers. In Minnesota. In January. These dipshits are also wearing camo in the snow. They clearly do not have any training when it comes to their own weapons either. Multiple times over the last few days, I watched officers fire pepper spray balls at the feet of protestors barely a few inches away from them. These weapons are basically paintball guns full of concentrated pepper spray. So when they hit a target, they explode into the air. Which meant ICE agents regularly ended up poisoning themselves with their own weapons. I also watched two agents ask each other if a canister they were about to fire at the crowd was tear gas or a stun grenade. (It ended up being a stun grenade that then ignited the tear gas they had already shot at us, which started a fire in the street that a protestor had to help them put out.)
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The lesson here is clear: We’re on our own now. They have guns and drones and they can hack our phones and smear our names online and arrest us without a warrant and charge us with terrorism. And all we have are whistles and protests and TikTok and group chats and maybe some journalism. Our local leaders are admitting they can’t help us. So we’re left with nothing but hope that all of that will be enough. But it’s impossible to shake the profoundly unsettling feeling that we have clearly stepped across the threshold into a very different political reality. And it’s not a matter of if it arrives in your town, but when.
The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere. COBOL, C, Linux and SQL are old, unglamorous and keep the world running. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols asks: What software from today will we still depend on in 50 or 100 years?
Nostalgia ain't what it used to be
I think I will reread “Funny Papers,” by Tom De Haven, first of a trilogy of novels that I loved, about the writers and artists behind a fictitious newspaper comic strip featuring a boy named Derby Dugan. The novels span New York in the 1890s-1970s, exploring the worlds of the newspaper industry, pop culture and life in those eras. The books are beautiful and sad; the comic strip brings joy to millions of people but not to its creators, who are miserable sods. That doesn’t sound like a fun read, but it is. I am highly romantic about midcentury New York, a place and time that I missed by a few years.
I wrote a review of “Derby Dugan’s Depression Funnies,” the second book in the series: A talking dog and puckered shoes: Derby Dugan’s Depression Funnies
When I first read that novel, I had no idea it was part of a trilogy; I was surprised and delighted to find the first novel, “Funny Papers,” years later, and then surprised and delighted again a few years later to find the third novel, “Dugan Underground.” The first novel, “Funny Papers,” covers the golden age of tabloid yellow journalism in the 1890s, “Depression Funnies” is about the peak of newspaper comic strips in the 1930s, when newspaper cartoonists were millionaire pop stars, and the final novel is about the hippie counterculture underground comic scene in the 1960s and 70s.
I’m gratified to see that De Haven is still alive and working, according to Wikipedia, though I’m disappointed to see that he apparently hasn’t produced a novel in 20 years. On the other hand, there are a few novels of his that I have not yet read, so new De Haven is on the horizon for me!
De Haven’s most recent novel, “It’s Superman!” is a kind of Superman reboot, inspired by the strips of the 1930s-1950s, “in which the hero is less concerned with super-villains and Lex Luthor and more with clearing slums … and exposing corrupt politicians.” It’s very good.
From Wikipedia:
The author noted in an interview that he agreed with Robert Crumb’s observation that the Thirties was the pinnacle of American culture. He also notes in the same interview that he finds truth to Art Spiegelman’s statement “that we are, for whatever reason, most nostalgic for the decade before the one we were born in”, as he was born in the Forties
The 1930s were certainly a great period in American culture, though I don’t know if they were the pinnacle.
As for being most nostalgic for the decade before the one we were born in — I say baloney. That would make me most nostalgic for the 1950s, which is a decade I have little interest in. If I had to pick favorite American decades that I did not live through, I’d pick the 1930s, 1940s and maybe I’d throw in the 1960s and 1970s, which I was too young to fully appreciate.
Other than the rise of the tech sector, the 1980s and 1990s were not very interesting for American culture — although they were very interesting, both personally and professionally, for me individually.
Arguably the 1990s were the peak of American prosperity and influence. There’s a funny post about that:
The Matrix described 1999 as the peak of human civilization and I laughed because that would obviously not age well but then the next 23 years happened and now I’m like yeah okay maybe the machines had a point
That was posted in 2022; four years later, 1999 is looking better and better.
it is may 5th, 2000. you are in the crowd at 30 rockefeller plaza watching steely dan perform “peg” on the today show. al gore is up in the polls. a few miles south, the twin towers stand tall, a potent symbol of the might of american capital. everything is going great 👍
If you’re a Steely Dan fan, do watch the video at the preceding link and cry for a lost, under-appreciated golden age.
Mel Brooks is still raising hell at 99
Hadley Freeman at Jewish News:
“Some days I’m not feeling as great as I want to. But other days I don’t even notice that I’m not 37 anymore.” He keeps ‘showbiz hours’, staying up late, sleeping late, starting his day in the afternoon with a breakfast omelette. “Then I take a walk in front of the house, up and down the steps to stay limber. I talk on the phone and I write – every day. Always writing, always correcting, always questioning.”
Brooks on his World War II experience:
Enlisting at 18, he fought in France and Germany as a combat engineer. What does he remember about it? “I remember thinking there’s nothing better than a ham and cheese baguette on the Champs-Élysées. Delicious, but very treif.”
Kevin Roose @kevin@theforkiverse.com asked: “tell me the last thing you bought for under $50 that radically improved your life.”
I replied: “This $5 dog poop bag holder. After the dog does her business and you scoop it up, tie a knot in the top of the full bag, hang the knotted bag from the handle of the leash, continue the walk without having to hold the poop bag in your hands.”
The thread is fun to read.
Kevin is tech columnist for the New York Times and podcasts on Hard Fork.
Many people set goals for a number of books to read each year. I don't think that's a good idea.
Feeling like you have a target number looming over you discourages you from abandoning books if you’re not enjoying them. How can you abandon a book when you’ve already read 100 pages?! You’ll fall behind on your goal! Starting a new book feels like a commitment, so you’re careful about which books you start.
Whereas if you feel free to quit reading, then you’re more likely to try new authors, genres and themes. Expanding your reading is more important than hitting an arbitrary number.
Another reason I don’t hold with setting a target number for books to read each year is that it discourages you from tackling a big giant enormous book. I read Ron Chernow’s massive, 1,200-page biography of Mark Twain last year and loved it. I would not have been so eager to jump into that book it if I felt like it would put me behind on a target goal.
I try to set myself a target of reading a certain number of pages every day. And if I miss my goal, I try not to sweat it too much. Last week I barely read any books at all, just from adjusting to being back at work after the holiday break. But I picked it up this weekend.
You can see how fragile and pathetic these men are. They are so desperate to subjugate and suppress people who disagree with them politically. They seemed to think that once they were in power, the public would love and admire them for their power. Instead, the vast majority of Americans see them for what they are: pathetic, insecure man-babies in way over their heads.
I loved the novel “The Ministry of Time” by Kaliane Bradley, which is a lighthearted workplace comedy and paranormal romance about colonialism and multigenerational trauma. You would not think those things go together but they do, splendidly well. 📚
Greg Morris: “The weird part isn’t that the indie web exists. It’s that we ever thought centralised platforms were a better idea.” I’d like for this to be right. But people still like their centralized platforms — their Facebook, Threads, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. The indie web is, unfortunately, still a rounding error compared with the numbers and influence of centralized platform users.
I finished reading “Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell,” an anthology of several novels and short stories. I read two of the novels: “Wasp” and “Sinister Barrier.” A few months ago I read one more by Russell: “Men, Martians and Machines.” Classic sci-fi from the 1930s-50s.
I’ve watched the rise of dictation tools for the Mac with some interest. I dictate more than half of what I write into the iPhone — which is a lot — email, text messages, notes to myself — but if I have a full-size keyboard, it’s easier for me to type than dictate.
"American exercising their constitutional rights must submit, without question, to a white man holding a gun."
Heather Cox Richardson compares the murders of Renee Good and Ahmad Arbery, the jogger gunned down by white supremacists in 2021. In both cases, defenders of the shooters released video of the incident which those defenders claimed would exonerate the shooters. But in fact the videos showed the killings for what they were — murder.
In the case of the murder of Renee Good, the shooter and his protectors are clearly so isolated in their own authoritarian bubble they cannot see how regular Americans would react to the video of a woman smiling at a masked agent and saying: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,” only to have him shoot her in the face and then spit out “Fucking btch” after he killed her.
The thread that runs through both is the assumption that an American exercising their constitutional rights must submit, without question, to a white man holding a gun.
A team of experts evicted a 550-pound bear that was squatting in the basement of an Altadena, Calif., home for more than a month. A member of the team crawled into the basement and fired paintballs filled with vegetable oil at the bear’s butt. Watch this Facebook reel of the bear making its exit.
The Rewatchables podcast has never done Clerks or Mallrats. Shocking!
Republicans somehow managed to sprint from “we’re trying to protect women in sports” straight to defending a woman being shot in the head three times at point blank range for trying to drive away from a masked thug.