Mitch Wagner

Trump pardoned Michele Fiore, a Nevada Republican who raised money to build a statue to honor a police officer killed in the line of duty, and used some of that money to pay personal costs, including plastic surgery.

Trump also pardoned Jan. 6 rioters who tried to murder police.

I hope the police remember these incidents when deciding whether to continue to support Republicans.

Tipping Is Everywhere and Consumers Are Fed Up. — WSJ

The theory and history of time travel — I’ll remind myself tomorrow to read this yesterday.

Shot from the hip! A street level view of 1970s New York – in pictures — Inspires me to take a lot more random, sloppy street photos and sort them out later.

Trump and his Repubican supporters are openly taking bribes, arresting judges whose actions they don’t like, building registries of Jews and autistic people, threatening to deport American citizens, some born here, putting people in concentration camps, dismantling America’s scientific and economic leadership, rewriting American history to erase Black contributions, and that’s just some damage done in their first three months. Gosh, I can’t wait to see what they get up to in May!

Here’s something I saw walking the dog this morning. The flowers are coming in at the park. The goslings are not far behind.

Responding to Trump, America’s allies are rushing to cut deals with China and remilitarizing, says Ian Welsh. “Even Japan, the most loyal of vassals, has noted that you can’t make a deal with Trump, because blackmailers always come back for more.” The outcome will be ugly for the U.S. and for Americans.

Rowling is playing edgelord from the comfort of a life so far removed from reality that the truth is just a speck in the distance. After years spent tarnishing her brand with rampant trans-exclusionary takes, she’s assured that her writing won’t define her legacy; her flagrant cowardice will.

— After J.K. Rowling’s transphobic gloating, it’s time to leave Harry Potter behind for good, by Coleman Spilde at Salon

The Very American Roots of Trumpism: Trump isn’t a freak or an outlier. He’s part of the long American tradition of illiberalism that includes Andrew Jackson, Jim Crow, Joseph McCarthy and Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback — Ezra Klein

‘Who’s our leader?’ In El Cajon, Rep. Sara Jacobs faces hundreds of residents eager to oppose Trump — San Diego Union-Tribune

Something I saw while walking the dog.

I cannot bear to throw away an empty cardboard box if it looks like a good box.

While I was walking the dog a few days ago, a car rolled up next to us and a young man rolled down his window and shouted, “THAT IS A BEAUTIFUL DOG!”

Minnie has been insufferably vain ever since.

One day more than 20 years ago, a friend was coming down from Los Angeles, about two hours away, to visit. We were going to meet up downtown. Until that day, we would have decided on a specific time and location to meet. That day, we agreed my friend would text me when he was about a half-hour out from downtown and I’d hop in my car and we’d figure out a place to meet on the fly.

This is perfectly ordinary behavior today, but at that time it felt like we were living in the future.

On a video meeting at work, someone’s dog was pestering their cat in the background. Later, someone mentioned this viral video from years ago. It’s even funnier than I remember it, and it just keeps getting better and better and more and more chaotic.

A Facebook friend commented on Robert A. Heinlein’s distinctive writing voice. I have noted this myself, and to me it is one of the pleasures of re-reading Heinlein.

It is a very, very midcentury American voice. To me, it seems strongly influenced by hard-boiled noir movies and screwball comedies. Although it is perhaps more likely that Heinlein was influenced by hardboiled authors rather than movies — maybe not Hammett and Chandler directly, but that school.

In Heinlein’s 24th Century, men drive spaceships and wear kilts, but they also smoke Lucky Strike cigarettes. Cab drivers have stogies sticking out of their mouths, and they call men “Bub” and “Mac.”

I sometimes see memes about Americans offended to hear Spanish or other foreign languages spoken publicly. Living where I do, when I go out around people, it’s unusual for me to not hear people speak Spanish or an Asian language. Somehow, I bear up under the strain of being around people minding their own business and doing things that don’t harm me in any way.

Shakespeare may not have left his wife Anne in Stratford for decades when he went to London. A researcher says a newly discovered text from a letter shows she lived with him in London, potentially upending the established belief that their marriage was unhappy. The Guardian

Phoenician culture spread across the Mediterranean not through mass migration but through cultural transmission and assimilation. “Ancient Mediterranean societies were cosmopolitan, with people from different regions trading, moving often over large distances and having offspring with each other.” The Max Planck Society

I just received an error message that says my magic link is no longer valid. My magic link is too valid. My magic link is in its PRIME.

Here’s something I saw on the sidewalk while walking the dog. Also: the dog.

The Patriotism Trap: Accepting the premise leads inevitably to the outcome. Hamilton Nolan

At 77, she’s as fit as a 25-year-old. What her body tells us about aging. The Washington Post

The evolution of the alpha male aesthetic. Bloomberg — Derek Guy walks through male style, from 19th Century bodybuilder Eugen Sandow to Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate. My style is best described as “are you sure you want to go out wearing that?”

“The Pitt’s” very horny fandom swallowed the web. Garbage Day — I love “The Pitt” but have not shipped anyone.

Please Enjoy These Images Of The 2025 Corgi Derby. Defector

Under Hegseth, Chaos Prevails at the Pentagon. NYTimes

An inside look at the New York City subway’s archaic signaling system. NYTimes — Fascinating article, beautiful photos and graphics.

How is it possible that we have lived in San Diego more than 25 years and have never been to the Creation & Earth History Museum?

The Creation and Earth History Museum is dedicated to the Biblical account of science and history. The museum showcases a literal six-day creation and young earth, including a human anatomy exhibit, life-size tabernacle display, age of the earth cave, dinosaur discovery zone and more.

For now at least, I’ve chosen to concentrate my social media activity on mitchw.blog and Facebook. I often just use Mastodon and Bluesky to send notifications that I have a new post up. I accept that costs me followers. But I don’t like it.

The platforms where I see the most activity are Facebook — which I just returned to in full force — and Tumblr. I just don’t seem to have gotten much traction on Bluesky and Mastodon.

I never was a Harry Potter fan but I admired J.K. Rowling enormously. It saddens me to see how her mind has become stunted and hateful

She has herself become like a character in a fantasy novel or comic book: a hero who became a supervillian.

I now go to an AI chatbot if I have a question, where formerly I’d do a Google search, find a website and look for the answer there. I still use a search engine if I’m looking for a particular website, which I often do.

10 TV character deaths that shocked fans. NYTimes — The death of Colonel Blake on “M*A*S*H” was and is the GOAT. It will never be topped.

But Adriana’s murder on Sopranos was respectable too.

Article author Jennifer Vineyard includes Buffy’s fake death. If I recall correctly, Buffy fake-died twice in the series. But the article fails to include the far greater death on that series: Buffy’s Mom.

This article includes a huge spoiler for a currently airing popular series.

Americans Are Obsessed With Protein and It’s Driving Nutrition Experts Nuts — The Wall Street Journal

The rally got a few hundred people. There were a dozen events throughout the county and the rally in downtown San Diego reportedly got thousands of participants. Protesters rallied nationwide

I keep forgetting you can buy prints of historical photos from Shorpy.com, unframed or framed. I think I’m going to just forget it again, on purpose.

I rebooted my Mac and the Vivaldi browser deleted about 50 open tabs in a workspace. Argh. I think I’m going to take a little break from Vivaldi for a while. And I wish software was a solid object so I could stomp on it and throw it out the window.

Klein:

The president of the United States is disappearing people to a Salvadoran prison for terrorists. A prison known by its initials — CECOT. A prison built for disappearance. A prison where there is no education or remediation or recreation, because it is a prison that does not intend to release its inhabitants back out into the world. It is a prison where the only way out, in the words of El Salvador’s so-called justice minister, is a coffin.

On Monday, President Trump said, in the Oval Office, in front of the cameras, sitting next to President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, that he would like to do this to U.S. citizens, as well.

Klein goes into some detail on the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, whom the Trump administration itself admits was mistakenly sent to CECOT. The Trump administration itself admits Garcia is no terrorist or gang member. But they won’t lift a finger to get him back.

If Trump can do this to Garcia, he can do this to anyone. You, me, anyone.

Once Trump’s dictatorship is established there is no way back within the current US system. When his regime finally collapses the models for reform will be those of post-war reconstruction of a defeated and discredited state, a process which is sometimes successful, sometimes not, but always painful.

— Crooked Timber, The point of no return: Only days left to stop a totalitarian state in the US

J.D. Vance on Twitter:

To say the administration must observe “due process” is to beg the question: what process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors. To put it in concrete terms, imposing the death penalty on an American citizen requires more legal process than deporting an illegal alien to their country of origin.

Matt Birchler:

I try to only bust out the curses when they’re warranted on this blog, but fuck everything about this. This clown who pretends to be an intellectual argues that due process, which the US Constitution guarantees to all “persons” in the 5th Amendment is more of a suggestion than a mandate.

…

Vance argues that someone facing the death penalty obviously deserves more due process than someone facing deportation. But that misses the point: the purpose of due process is to determine whether the government’s charge is legitimate in the first place, not just to scale the process to the severity of the punishment.

Ian Welsh:

This comes back to the simplest problem in negotiating with Trump: you can’t actually cut a deal, because he’ll always come back for more. American elites are beginning to realize that they can’t conditionally surrender: they can’t give Trump some stuff and expect to be otherwise left alone.

I think the odds of significant elite opposition are high. They don’t want to, but Trump has backed them into a corner.

This comes back to the simplest problem in negotiating with Trump: you can’t actually cut a deal, because he’ll always come back for more. American elites are beginning to realize that they can’t conditionally surrender: they can’t give Trump some stuff and expect to be otherwise left alone.

I think the odds of significant elite opposition are high. They don’t want to, but Trump has backed them into a corner.

And Zuckerberg is seeing that his paying off and sucking up to Trump and the right hasn’t bought Meta any protection. Trump is happy to take your money and sycophancy and then fuck you over anyway.

Juan Carlos Lopez Gomez, a U.S.-born citizen, was detained by ICE as an “unauthorized alien,” despite his mother’s presenting authorities with his birth certificate and Social Security card. Lopez Gomez was born in Georgia.

Hafiz Rashid at The New Republic:

He appears to have been arrested and charged under an “anti-immigration” law passed in Florida two months ago, despite the fact that the law is currently under a temporary restraining order and isn’t supposed to be enforced.

Also: ICE officers literally smashed a car window open to arrest the wrong man

He slept in caves and walked a 365-mile circle over and over for decades.

Sam Anderson at the New York Times:

In summer and in winter, in every possible kind of weather, the man wore, from head to toe, an outrageous outfit he seems to have made himself: rough leather patches stitched together with long leather strips, like a quilt. It was stiff, awkward, stinky and brutally heavy. It looked like knight’s armor made out of baseball gloves. To anyone encountering him on a quiet country lane, he must have seemed almost unreal: a huge slab of brown, twice as wide as a normal man, his suit creaking and squeaking with every step.

…

The 21st century, unfortunately, turns out to be the perfect moment to be obsessed with his story. America keeps spasming, with increasing violence, in many of the same ways it spasmed in the 1800s.

And so Anderson decided to walk the Old Leatherman’s route.

A grim longread by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor at The Guardian: “The governing ideology of the far right has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism. Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them.”

[Right-wing American oligarchs] have been championing what they call “exit” – the principle that those with means have the right to walk away from the obligations of citizenship, especially taxes and burdensome regulation. Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies.

These billonaires see the world burning down and they’re not trying to stop it. They’re pouring gasoline on it. The oligarchs “believe “our planet is headed towards a cataclysm and it’s time to make some hard choices about which parts of humanity can be saved.”

How do we break this apocalyptic fever? First, we help each other face the depth of the depravity that has gripped the hard right in all of our countries. To move forward with focus, we must first understand this simple fact: we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world – on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.==

Second, we counter their apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for our collective survival. A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.

Ben Werdmuller prescribes building value-added services on top of the AT protocol while encouraging others to do the same. This is a similar business model to GitHub.

“Perhaps ironically, this vision comes closer to building an “everything app” than will ever be possible in a closed ecosystem. That’s been Elon Musk’s longtime goal for X, but Bluesky’s approach, in my opinion, is far more likely to succeed. It’s not an approach that aims to build it all themselves; it’s a truly open social web that we can all build collaboratively.”

Werdmuller also plans to lay out some prescriptions for Mastodon, and I am looking forward to reading those.

I get that Mastodon is, at least for now, open while BlueSky is, for now, as much a silo as Facebook or Twitter. But BlueSky is where the energy is, and I’d like to see it thrive and open up.

I’d also like to see the walls come down between Mastodon, BlueSky and the web. Because for now it looks like we’re rebuilding the silos of Web 2.0, but doing it with open source. Open source doesn’t matter if everything is still siloed, which it now is. And it’s painful to see Mastodon users scoff at BlueSky and BlueSky users dismiss Mastodon. We’re all on the same team here.

I’d also like to see both Mastodon and BlueSky support long posts, but I get that might be antithetical to their cultures.

If one’s name is a brand, then mine is tarnished.

—Elon Green at The New York Times

Like Green, I am a man with a relatively uncommon first name. I share that name with the recent Republican Speaker of the House. I am active in the local Democratic Club, and one of the women on the board is a sweetheart who gets quite exercised over Republican abuses. She has a thunderous voice and swears blisteringly when she’s worked up. At meetings, I’d hear her shout, “FUCKING MITCH!” and I’d flinch. “What?! What did I do?!”

When Julie and I are both out of town we board the dog at a place called Camp Bow Wow. They give us a report card for the dog and sign their emails “Furry regards.” At first, that seemed painfully twee, but who am I kidding? Do I think I’m some gangsta? I love the report cards and the furry regards.

Documentary Claims Jim Morrison Is Alive, Living in Syracuse. Break on through, Jim.

F. Scott Fitzgerald:

Those seven precious hours of sleep suddenly break in two. There is, if one is lucky, the “first sweet sleep of night” and the last deep sleep of morning, but between the two appears a sinister, ever widening interval."

That’s me. Or was, until I started taking Trazadone a few months ago. It’s an amazing miracle drug.

My insomnia almost always follows the same pattern: I don’t have any trouble getting to sleep at first. I fall asleep, deep and sweet, for a couple of hours, and then I get up to pee and can’t get back to sleep. I lay in bed a little while, trying various mind tricks and torturing myself with anxiety and self-loathing. Sometimes that lasts for hours, until morning. Sometimes I get up for a couple of hours, which reduces the anxiety and self-loathing but it’s not sleeping. Sometimes I can get back to sleep before the alarm goes off, but it’s not enough sleep and I stagger through the rest of the day. Sometimes I just sit there until it’s time to wash up and start the day.

I used to get insomnia attacks like that a few times a week. Now, it’s down to a couple of times a month, thanks to Trazadone.

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

Over a 50-year-career, Villanch worked on campy variety shows that live forever on YouTube, including the Brady Bunch Variety Hour and the Star Wars Holiday Special. They are the subject of his new book, “It Seemed Like A Bad Idea At The Time: The Worst TV Shows in History and Other Things I Wrote.”

Villanch is best known as a regular guest on Hollywood Squares, and he was head writer at the Academy Awards for 15 years. “It’s the kind of entertainment he writes for where he really excels: star-studded variety shows with big, brassy musical numbers.”

You’ll remember Villanch if you’ve seen him on TV: He’s a big, fat gay man with a blonde Prince Valiant haircut, who wears novelty T-shirts and chunky eyeglasses with frames in bright primary colors. He has a big deep voice and a sharp, fast wit.

Anytime Villanch is on an interview podcast, I’ll listen that podcast. He’s full of great old showbiz stories.

When I was a kid in the late 60s and very early 70s, there were a lot of toys that looked cool but they only did one thing and that one thing ceased to be entertaining in a few minutes.

After much nagging, my parents got us a remote-controlled toy flatbed semi-truck. The remote control operated with a wire about three feet long, and the truck was about two feet long.

You could drive the truck around the playroom a little bit. It crept along on its little wheels.

And that was it. Entertainment value for about five minutes.

Same for a toy plastic hovercraft, about a foot long, oval-shaped. You held a little motor in your hand, and the motor was attached to a long, thin hose, like the clear plastic hoses you found in a fishtank. The motor operated a fan that blew air through the hose and caused the lightweight plastic toy hovercraft to float.

You couldn’t steer the hovercraft. You could drag it around on the floor for a bit. Then what? Entertainment value: About five minutes.

It’s a cliche, but it’s true: The best toys are simple and open-ended. Blocks. Big cardboard boxes — the kind that a washing machine ships in. Snow that can make into a fort or castle.

I remember when I was about 11 years old, sitting on the floor in the playroom and building vast brutalist palaces out of Lego bricks. It was a meditative activity. You have a lot to think about when you’re 11 years old.

I host my blog on Micro.blog. It is in many ways a lovely service but I do not recommend it to others because tech support is lackadaisical. I’m low-key keeping my eyes open for alternatives, but there aren’t many and the ones that exist seem to be susceptible to the same problems as Micro.blog.

Elephants at the San Diego Zoo form an “alert circle” to protect a young elephant and each other during yesterday’s 5.2-magnitude earthquake — YouTube

The group stayed tightly together for about four minutes. A zoo spokesperson said the behavior is called an “alert circle” and said it is “intended to protect the young — and the entire herd — from threats.”

— San Diego Union-Tribune

Charles Dickens was an inveterate walker, going for hours every day at a brisk pace, usually alone. “He did so because walking time was thinking time, or perhaps more accurately dreaming time.,” writes Luke McKernan.

Dickens walked in the day and in the night. He once got up at two in the morning and walked 30 miles to breakfast.

Today, McKernan lives in “the heart of Dickens territory,” Rochester and the Medway towns in England.

The high street businesses alone bear witness to the Dickensian connection: they include Tiny Tim’s Tearooms, Fezziwig’s, Mr Tope’s, Ebenezer’s, Pips of Rochester, Sweet Expectations, and the inspired A Taste of Two Cities. In days past we have had Hard Times the antique shop, and – believe it or not – the Havisham Wedding Centre, which perhaps not surprisingly went out of business.

Richard Kind Is Glad He’s Not That Famous — Fresh Air. An interview with a brilliant comic character actor whose face and voice you recognize even if you don’t know his name. He is a treasure.

“So the president of the United States proposes, on camera, to deport Americans to foreign concentration camps.” — Timothy Snyder

Unions need to be ready to strike. It’s the source of their power. “When radical things happen, only fools do not become more radical.” — Hamilton Nolan

The unbearable lightness of Korean cute — Chris Arnade walkingtheworld.substack.com

“ICE is making arrests wearing masks, not showing ID and grabbing people off the street into unmarked vans. Straight up Gestapo shit…. I can’t even count the number of actions Trump has taken which should lead to impeachment.” ianwelsh.net

Blue Cross of Louisiana doesn’t give a shit about breast cancer: The insurer pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars in payments for breast reconstructive procedures that it previously approved, on the Orwellian rationale that just because they approved it doesn’t mean they agreed to pay it. pluralistic.net

We just had an earthquake. 5.2 magnitude about 32 miles from here (near Julian). Bigger and longer than any I’ve personally experienced. No damage or injury in and around our house.

ME DURING AN EARTHQUAKE: “Um, I think we’re supposed to go outside? I’ll just get my coffee first.”

Cory Doctorow: Instead of retaliatory tariffs, US trade partners should repeal anti-circumvention laws that protect US tech monopolies. “Indeed, repealing anticircumvention is a frontal assault on the firms whose CEOs ringed Trump on the inauguration dais.” jacobin.com

Musk gets his political philosophy from a 100-year-old antisemitic and racist movement called Technocracy, which advocated replacing governments with engineers and scientists. Musk’s grandfather was a leading Technocrat who moved to South Africa because he thought apartheid was grand. nytimes.com

Elections Aren’t About Compromise— They’re About Power… Let the Consultants Burn: Democrats' fear of identity politics and wokeness convinces nonwhite voters that Democrats don’t care about them and that’s how Democrats lose. downwithtyranny.com

Crossing the U.S. Border? Here’s How to Protect Yourself theintercept.com/2025/03/2…

Gen Z is flocking to Tumblr. businessinsider.com. I’ve been on Tumblr since 2009 and I’m still active today. That makes me either “forever young” or “a creepy old guy.” I’m going to go with “creepy old guy.”

The original Star Wars is back – but what if George Lucas is right about it not being much good? Lucas said the original 1977 version was half a movie and preferred the 1997 digital remaster. theguardian.com

I was 16 when I saw “Star Wars” in 1977 in the theaters. It blew me away.

RIP Jean Marsh, who created and starred in “Upstairs, Downstairs.” She was born into the working class. “If you were very working class in those days, you weren’t going to think of a career in science,” she said in 1972. “You either did a tap dance or you worked in Woolworth’s.” nytimes.com

Life advice from octogenarian Roger Rosenblatt at the New York Times:

2. Make young friends.

For older folks, there is nothing more energizing than the company of the young. They’re bright, enthusiastic, informative and brimming with life, and they do not know when you’re telling them lies.

Also:

6. Everyone’s in pain.

If you didn’t know that before, you know it now. People you meet casually, those you’ve known all your life, the ones you’ll never see – everyone’s in pain. If you need an excuse for being kind, start with that.

A lovely, wise and funny essay.

Do me a favor please: If you’re reading this on Mastodon, please reply. Late Friday afternoon, I migrated my Mastodon account (which is, or was, @mitchw@mastodon.social) to my MIcro.blog blog (@MitchW@mitchw.blog).

But I’m not sure if it worked.

So please let me know if you see this message on Mastodon, and also please let me know if you recall whether you followed me on @mitchw@mastodon.social or @MitchW@mitchw.blog.

Thanks!

Bluesky’s Quest to Build Nontoxic Social Media. newyorker.com. Kyle Chayka writes an in-depth profile of Bluesky CEO Jay Graeber.

“I’m Not a ‘Gatsby’ Scholar. I’m a ‘Gatsby’ Weirdo.” Andrew Clark has listened to “The Great Gatsby,” read by Jake Gyllenhaal, more than 200 times since 2020. This is a lovely short essay about a lot more than one man’s obsession with a single book. nytimes.com

I think I’ll sign up for the Pro subscription for ChatGPT again. I’m intrigued by the new persistent memory feature.

The Week ChatGPT Truly Became an Assistant. parkerortolani.blog

A roomba that continuously says “polish polish” would get annoying quickly.

James Lundberg, writing at The Atlantic, describes how the new technology of photography changed people’s perceptions of themselves and their faces.

When Abraham Lincoln was running for President in 1860, a little girl wrote him a letter advising him to grow a beard to improve his appearance. And so he did.

“If you will let your whiskers grow,” she wrote, “you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin.”

I think this story is familiar to most Americans, taught in schools. What I did not realize until reading this article is that Lincoln’s looks were an issue because photography was new — it first came to the US 21 years earlier. Photo studios quickly swept the country and set off a fad for portraiture.

Those having their likeness taken for the first time did so with some combination of wonder and trepidation. Posing before the camera, early sitters said they felt drafts of air on their face or tingling in their cheeks. The process was orchestrated by a camera operator under a blanket–whom [Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing in The Atlantic in 1859] described as a chemical-wielding “skeleton shape, of about a man’s height, its head covered with a black veil.” The experience seemed to partake of the occult. And the results, often ghostly because of the long exposure times required, only strengthened such feelings.

These early sitters weren’t entirely wrong. There was no sorcery involved, but something was happening to them in front of the camera. Becoming an image, reckoning with an entirely new form of self-presentation, introduced an intense awareness not just of the self, but of the face.

Parallels to the later invention of television and smartphones are apparent.

RIP George Bell, 67, who stood 7'8" and was listed by Guinness as the tallest man in America. “I never had anyone else around who was 7-8 who I could talk to and who could help me learn how to handle it,” he said. “Fortunately for me, I’m a very patient person.” nytimes.com

A Rhode Island state legislator suggests getting around the Trump tariffs using a 1663 “royal charter” to declare the state a “free trade zone.” Sure, why not? abc6.com

Zuckerberg in the dock: The antitrust case against Meta is strong and the Trump White House seems inclined to pursue it aggressively. [pluralistic.net]

“You have only two choices if Trump comes after you: 1. If Domestic, fight. 2. If foreign, and he’s only threatening, tell him to pound sand and ignore him. If he does something, retaliate.” [ianwelsh.net]

Welsh is talking about strategy, not ethics. Obedience doesn’t work with Trump, who sees compliance as weakness and comes back for more.

“Apparently, people don’t want the US dollar to be a meme stock.” Also: “Far-right populist parties get into power by raging against the incumbents and the establishment and then once they’re in office, they have to continue to pretend like they aren’t actually in power.” [garbageday.email]

Scientists dispute Colossal Biosciences’ claims to have brought the dire wolf back from extinction. “… extinction is still forever.”

I’m still traumatized from the season finale of “The Pitt.”

I want to see one feature in the iPhone and iPad: support for a clipboard manager that runs in the background. I don’t care about Siri, thinner devices, foldable phones, improved battery life or other rumored advances. Just give me a clipboard manager that runs in the background.

It’s the photo that ends the movie, of Jack Nicholson in period costume composited into a photo of dozens of formally-dressed 1920s partygoers.

Matt Growcoot at PetaPixel:

After decades of mystery, the original image — sans Jack Nicholson — has finally resurfaced in a photo archive after 45 years…. no one kept a record of where, what, and who was in the original photo. Following an investigation by retired British academic Alasdair Spark and New York Times journalist Aric Toler, it has been revealed the original photo was taken by the now defunct Topical Press Agency at a St. Valentine’s Day Ball in the Royal Palace Hotel, London, on February 14, 1921.

Trump White House budget proposal eviscerates science funding at NASA. “This would decimate American leadership in space.”

Massive cuts to NASA science are proposed in an early White House budget plan. “This is an extinction-level event for NASA science.”

Trump Is Stupid, Erratic and Weak (Paul Krugman)

Aussies miss when morning routine didn’t involve finding out whatever the fuck this cunt did today (John Delmenico / The Chaser)

Trump’s Psychological Vulnerability (Timothy Snyder) — “Donald Trump thinks that everyone is always ripping him off.” Trump has no conception of doing business fairly or of a deal where both sides are happy.

The Sick Psychology Behind Trump’s Tariff Chaos (Timothy Noah / The New Republic) — “Caregivers with [Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy] don’t poison their children once and then restore them to health. They do it over and over, because the cycle from sickness to health brings them pleasure.”

Nothing in your workflow is permanent (Matt Birchler)

The New York Times Ethicist blesses pirating e-books if you’ve already bought the hardcover. (Randy Cohen — thanks, Cory!)

Ian Welsh

Trump has shown himself to be a partner who can’t be trusted — he’s unreliable and routinely goes back on his word. But Western nations hate China enough that Trump might pull this off, Welsh says.

If so, we’ll be the weaker side, as the USSR/Warsaw Pact was last time and we will lose the new Cold war, falling further and further behind technologically and watching as the Chinese enjoy goods we can barely even dream of, just as was true of the late Soviet Union.

Everything, and I mean everything, will be sacrificed to keep the oligarchs in power, keep making them richer and keep the flow of unearned cash pouring into every rich person’s orifices.

On the other hand, the EU and China are in talks to end EU tariffs on electric vehicles. “That sound you hear is Elon Musk puckering up to kiss his ass goodbye.”

“Paper is good. Somehow, a blank page and a pen makes the universe open up before you." (Dynomight) — All my writing, note-taking and task lists go into my computer or phone. I love the idea of writing on paper, but I do not do it. For me, this article is aspirational.

Tariffs, integrity, and chaos (Matt Birchler)

What do we think of Google Gemini? How does it compare with ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude?

I have two superpowers: finding the right-sized Tupperware container for leftovers and moving things around in the refrigerator until there is room for something else when the refrigerator looks full.