I’m seeing rumors he’s alive after all. Fuck.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an executive order requiring law enforcement, including feds, to wear masks and ID and activate body cameras when operating in the city. The order is almost certainly symbolic because Johnson lacks federal jurisdiction.
Asked about how effective his order is going to be given that federal agents don’t take orders from him, Johnson shot back: “Yeah, and I don’t take orders from the federal government. Thank you all very much.”
How To Argue With An AI Booster. By the indomitable Edward Zitron.
I’ve been feeling nostalgic recently for Long Island, where I grew up. This Reddit thread is gratifying: What things represent Long Island?. Top comment: “A large paper bag filled with an assortment of fresh bagels” Followed by: “A hot salt bagel that you eat in the car on the way home because it’s a sin not to eat a hot bagel.”
The capitalism of fools: Trump’s mirror-world New Deal.
Cory Doctorow: Trump’s tariffs, demands of government stakes in companies and selective antitrust enforcement superficially echo left‑leaning industrial policy. But Trump’s policies aren’t thought out; they’re just performative chaos. Trump is part of a right-wing mirror world of imagined conspiracies that superficially resemble real problems. One danger is that when Trump is gone, America will desperately need robust state action, but Trump’s bad example will convince America that all state action is reckless.
The problem isn’t that tariffs are always bad, nor is it that demanding state ownership stakes in structurally important companies that depend on public funds is bad policy. The problem is that Trump’s version of these policies sucks, because everything Trump touches dies, and because he governs solely on vibes, half-remembered wisdom imparted by the last person who spoke to him, and the dying phantoms of old memories as they vanish beneath a thick bark of amyloid plaque.
Heather Cox Richardson shares a brief history of the Chicano movement of the 1960s. She uses the 1970 police killing of journalist Rubén Salazar as a launch point.
… in the 1960s, young Mexican Americans, most of whom had been born in the U.S., began to reimagine their community and its position in the United States. Calling themselves “Chicanos,” they called for a new identity based in the understanding that they were not outsiders at all, but rather natives of the northern region of old Mexico, a region that did not become part of the United States until long after the Chicano people–Indigenous Americans mixed with the descendents of Spanish invaders–had settled there.
Chicanos noted that they had not moved into the United States, but rather the United States border had moved over them. The U.S. had taken over the land on which they lived in 1848 after the U.S.-Mexico War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which had established the new boundary between the two countries far to the south of where it had been before, was supposed to guarantee the land titles of those Mexican landowners over whom the border had moved. But U.S. courts had disregarded the terms of the treaty and refused to recognize the rights of Mexicans, most of whom lost their land.
I knew that the US took the land I live on from Mexico in 1848. We learned about that in public school in New York, where I grew up. But until now I did not make the connection that many of my Latino neighbors have ancestry in America far longer than my own.
Threads is testing a way to share long-form text on the platform.
I’d love to see Mastodon and Bluesky do the same. I am not a fan of microblogging with hard character limits, but I do it because that’s where people are.
Manton is concerned that Threads “would centralized blog-like content that should be on someone’s own site.” That ship is called Facebook and it has already sailed.
I resumed using Obsidian for note-taking and writing a few days ago. The two can be complementary. We’ll see how that goes.
Qualified people get fired or leave. Sycophants, stooges, frauds, charlatans, lackeys, lickspittles, bootlickers, and phonies take over. And this prescription is being filled across all of government, making the prognosis for the country’s health, both now and into the future, increasingly bleak.