Year in rearview – gee bobg

In the latter part of this year I ramped down my posting on Facebook (as I had previously done on Twitter) in favor of BlueSky. Time to get serious about resisting the oligarchs. [Previously.]

[On Jan 1st, friend asks, “Where’s my #$%^& flying car?!”]https://youtu.be/lhALK64e4bk
First Dad’s-birthday-without-Dad. He would have been 88 today – his target age (though I always told him he should aim for 100). He very nearly made it.We all miss you Dad.

[Friend writes about getting food-poisoned by Starbucks on her birthday.]Happy birthday!
I once mentioned a case of food poisoning to my doctor and shrugged it off, only to get an earful about the obligation to make a health-department report, potentially saving others from the same risk – others who may be less resilient and have worse outcomes.
[Friend posts a highway sign saying only, “Don’t.” Calls it the slogan for 2024.]Don’t
A video of Shirley Bassey singing “Diamonds Are Forever” is captioned, “Shirley Bassey performs Goldfinger.”A still image from Goldfinger of Sean Connery and Shirley Eaton (“Jill Masterson”) is captioned, “Sean Connery and Honor Blackman” (who played “Pussy Galore”).
(They may have fixed these problems by the time you click through.)

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/james-bond-films-bfi-trigger-warning-b2473283.html
- The article is about content warnings for “outdated language and stereotypes.” Nothing about James Bond literally raping the gay out of Pussy Galore.
[Friend asks for the most in-the-pocket musical performance.]The first one that comes to mind for me (which may not be the best I can come up with) is Herman’s Habit, from the La La Land soundtrack. https://youtu.be/1V5l_LbmWlQ
[Friend writes a post about having to wait to get your photos developed back in the day.]“When I was your age we had this stuff called film
You would stick in a camera before you took a shot
And then you had to wait, like, a week
Until you could tell what pictures you got
You would hand the film to a guy in a parking lot
Who lived in a booth
Yeah, it’s the truth.”

https://youtube.com/watch?v=lkPA80RsUC8
[Friend asks for the right order in which to watch the Star Wars nonology.]I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: 4.
[Friend posts a photo of an old Thomas Guide.]Hey look, someone printed out Google Maps!
Regular brain: Take butter out of the fridge a little while before using it, to let it reach a spreadable temperature.Planet brain: Design, and plan someday to build, a countertop butter chiller, keeping butter at a compromise temperature – cool enough to be preserved, but warm enough to be spreadable.
Galaxy brain: Occasionally dump some heavy cream and a little salt into the bowl of my stand mixer, whip the bejeesus out of it, and squeeze it out in a tea towel. Presto: fresh delicious butter that’s spreadable even at fridge temperature.
- [At the suggestion of a friend.]Don’t refrigerate the butter?? I don’t know, that seems like cheating.
[Friend posts about the legendary shock-video “Faces of Death.”]Never saw it, and not for lack of opportunity. Even at the age when my friends were talking about it, I was aware that there are some things you can’t unsee that I didn’t want in my head.
Ever since I chopped some chives for my omelet this morning, I’ve been hearing the Bee Gees in my head singing, “Chive Talkin’.”Now you do too. You’re welcome.
Don’t feel foolish
Making a poolish
The resulting boule
Will fucking rule
Why does the word for a woman’s doctor start with “guy”?
- [Friend comments, “GY, not GUY.”]Just the kind of fig leaf the language bros like to hide behind.
[Friend posts a photo of a thumbtack in her salad.]If this ever happens again, you’ll know just what to do. You’ll have a plan of a tack. (*ducks*)
[Friend posts about a robot waiter. Another wonders if it asked for a tip.]We won’t have to say yes or no. Our robots will tip the waiter robots on our behalf.
I confess to being both ignorant and curious about the juggernaut that is Taylor Swift. I can’t name a single one of her songs, and I gather that some of them must be worth knowing. Where should I start? Can you give me a three-song “get to know Taylor” playlist?
[Friend posts old tweet, “The fact that some people can’t distinguish between etymology and entomology bugs me in ways I can’t put into words.”]Laughed so hard I almost needed an enterologist.
[Friend coins “Errogant: When you’re completely wrong, but you’re also totally certain about it.”]When you’re a man and you think you can make an attractive woman like you by explaining things to her, you are miss-taken.
[Friend posts a warning about a gift-card scam.]Gift cards: like cash, but worse!
Lisa Frankenstein: the first film in a very long time that I went in to see knowing nothing more than the title. I was amply rewarded, and I’ll tell you nothing more than: so will you be.
[Wil Wheaton posts old tweet, “If you really want a Star Trek future, it’s not just going to space in cool machines. It’s building a society with respect for all life, sentient and otherwise; applying science wisely; and pursuing principles of justice, fairness, and reason. Let’s build that and ride it to the stars.”]This 17-year-old bulletin board comment:
“It isn’t Star Trek’s “optimism” that made it great. It’s the idea that in the future the Carl Sagans of the universe will be in charge and successfully run society on the principles of secular humanism and science while the George Bush and Dick Cheneys of the universe are Klingons. Star Trek is about the promise of a new Enlightenment, not the depressing notion of another Dark Ages.”
[Friend asks whether this Sartre quote sounds familiar: “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”]Yes it does.
But that doesn’t mean don’t engage. Do engage – but do it for the benefit of the others who are watching and listening, silently forming impressions from the interaction between reason and bad faith.
[BlueSky post]CPAC applause line: “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely.”
CPAC Speaker’s Goal: Ending Democracy
If you think democracy is a problem, think who stands to benefit from your thinking so.
- Just putin this out there.
Nothing about a person’s identity can make them filth.How they regard others, however, absolutely can.
Republican state lawmaker refers to LGBTQ+ community as ‘filth’ | CNN
- Assholes like this abound, and always have. What’s really dangerous is this:“Many public officials and community leaders have remained silent about the controversial statement. The Oklahoman reached out […] but few wanted to speak publicly.”
  As the nation reacts to Sen. Tom Woods’ ‘filth’ comment, is there controversy at home?
To this day, every time I eat a stack of pancakes, I flash back to the wordless “cold open” of an episode of Anything But Love from 1989. Richard Lewis and Jamie Lee Curtis are at a diner. He sees someone else’s stack of pancakes and makes as if to order some for himself. She stops him with a finger wag and a shake of her head. He gestures, “Why not?” She pantomimes becoming fat.The show was short-lived and has aged poorly. But it laid essential groundwork for the amazing Mad About You.
RIP Richard Lewis.
- Also: pour some out every time you hear someone disparage something as “the X from hell.” They can all be traced back to Lewis.
[Friend posts, “Replacing a ribbon. Unsticking keys. These were the manual transmission of typing.”]Making an exclamation point by typing apostrophe-backspace-period.
What everyday thing will today’s kids remember in a few decades and think, “Man, I’m old”?
[Friend writes about a lifelong fascination with flying.]Have you ever thought about learning to fly? I can highly recommend finding a reputable local flight school and booking a “discovery flight.”
- [Friend insists small planes aren’t for her.]Well if you ever feel like having your mind changed (maybe), check out https://youtu.be/rizi_2paMGM and the other videos on Stevie’s channel. She does a great job of demystifying private-piloting while exhibiting excellent technique and conveying the joy, beauty, and freedom that make it all worth it.
[Friend-of-friend comments about the “Indiana Jones minute” podcast.]I am thrilled to know about this, thank you! I can return the favor: some years ago there was the same thing for the movie The Rocketeer, and it was excellent. https://www.rocketeerminute.com/
[Friend asks, “Am I the only one who starts a ChatGPT request with Please?”]As in, “Please, ChatGPT, don’t come for my job”?
[Archaeologists uncover colossal Egyptian statue. Friend posts the link along with the poem, Ozymandias.]I don’t see a sneer of cold command. More like neutral contemplation of that afternoon’s errands. “Look on my to-do list, ye mighty, and drop by the dry cleaner if you’re going to be in that area!”
[Friend posts this optical illusion, says the blue stripes are all parallel.]That’s just, like, your opinion, man.
In his very first line of the novel, the villain of Dune chuckles, alludes to the trap he has set for his enemy, our heroes, and says, quote, “Is it not a magnificent thing that I, the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, do?”Is it not right that I, the middle-aged science fiction fan Bob Glickstein, wonder how Frank Herbert’s writing license was not promptly revoked?
- (In case it isn’t clear: I kid because I love. Exposition is hard, and the rest of Dune is enough of a mind-blowing masterpiece that we can overlook a little mustache-twirling.)
- [Friend who is a notorious Dune fan concedes that his “inner Bob Glickstein” would probably feel the same if he re-read the book today.]You may have meant the phrase “my inner Bob Glickstein” innocuously, but it sent me on quite the reverie and produced this verse:
  Inside you
  There’s an inner me
  Who talks to you
  Independently
  
  He says things that
  I’ve never said
  But might if I
  Were in your head
  
  How faithful
  This facsimile
  To the outer me
  That others see?
  
  How much like me,
  This me in you?
  How much does he
  Combine we two?
  
  Would I endorse
  His words to you?
  Approve of what
  He helps you do?
  
  Or would I say
  “No, that’s not me”
  If ever I could
  Your me see
  
  You may think
  The same things too
  ‘Cause in my head’s
  An inner you
  
  I’d like to
  Introduce those two:
  Your inner me,
  My inner you
  
  Would others
  Seeing them discuss
  Believe that
  They were watching us?
  
  Your inner me
  May outlive me
  Is this
  Immortality?
If I ever start an orthopedic shoe business, I’m calling it De Agony Of De Feet
[Friend who live-comments the Oscars warns, “Now would be a good time to mute me” as the ceremony begins.]“Now would be a good time to mute everyone else but me.” FTFY
[Friend posts graph showing deaths due to lightning dropping from ~6/year to ~zero over the course of the 20th century.]You kids should get outside more.
[Trump-supporting friend posts meme, “If you don’t prosecute criminals, of course crime is down.” Other friend calls out Trump’s own criminality. First friend says, “I never mentioned Trump.”]I think that’s disingenuous. The meme is implicitly calling out those who claim that crime is down – which President Biden did very conspicuously just a few days ago in his State of the Union speech. That brings this squarely into the realm of presidential politics, and so it is in fact a post in support of Donald Trump. But by not coming right out and saying so it gives plausible deniability for those who want to pretend otherwise.
Anyway, this meme invites the conspiracy-minded to believe that somehow the drop in the crime rate is a deception, and is being orchestrated by prosecutors. But that idea does not bear up to scrutiny. First, it would (implausibly) involve the cooperation of hundreds of jurisdictions, many of them not friendly to President Biden; and second, the crime rate is compiled from a vast collection of sources and isn’t simply the number of prosecutions. For more on this, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_statistics
- [Discussion continues.]It’s right to be skeptical of a claim like “crime is down,” especially when that claim benefits a politician.
  By the same token it is wrong to dismiss the claim out of hand as “laughable.” That is itself a claim that also benefits a politician, and must be approached with the same skepticism.
  
  How might you determine whether crime is actually up or actually down?
  
  One thing you can’t go by is the news. When something appears on the news, that means it’s out of the ordinary and doesn’t normally happen. If it’s what normally happens, by definition it’s not “news.” Watching the news, it’s easy to get the impression that we live in a world of crime, disasters, and endless other kinds of outrage, when in fact things are largely fine. But who would tune in to watch that?
[Friend posts an appreciation of Weird Al’s song parodies.]Individual-song parodies are one thing. Style parodies are on a whole nother level. The best Talking Heads song, for example, is Weird Al’s “Dog Eat Dog.” His “Craigslist” perfectly embodies The Doors. And They Might Be Giants are kicking themselves for not having written “Everything You Know Is Wrong.”
I’ve written some pretty decent parody lyrics in my time, if I may say so. But I wouldn’t even know where to begin with a style parody. Respect.
[Friend posts about the Guinness world-record holder who eats two Big Macs per day.]Some fun facts:
The McDonald’s Big Mac was invented by a franchisee in PITTSBURGH (where I went to college).

It was designed to compete with the “Big Boy” sandwich from BOB’s Big Boy.

The first name for the new sandwich was “The Aristocrat.” That didn’t catch on, so they tried “Blue Ribbon Burger.” When that didn’t work, they went with the suggestion from 21-year-old advertising secretary Esther GLICKSTEIN Rose, “Big Mac.” (No relation, AFAIK.)
[Robert Reich posts about the regressiveness of the cap on the social-security tax.]I suspect that the phrase “cap on the Social Security payroll tax” does not land with people the way it should. I would spell it out. “If you made $50,000 last year, you paid $3,100 to Social Security – 6.2%. If you made $500,000, you paid $10,453 – 2.1%.”
[Friend posts, “It is always enlightening to see how events that you know about are portrayed on the news. Makes you wonder about the other news, doesn’t it?”]See https://loricism.fandom.com/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_Effect
“Johnson, Navin R. Sounds like a typical bastard.”RIP M. Emmet Walsh
“It was not called the Net of a Million Lies for nothing.”RIP Vernor Vinge
[Ahead of our high school reunion, friend asks everyone to say where they went to college and what important thing they learned there.]I went to Carnegie-Mellon, where I learned that maybe New York isn’t the center of the universe, and being from there didn’t make me the shit. If I wanted to be the shit, it was going to have to be for a different reason.
[Friend posts graph of declining church membership among US adults, now below 50% for the first time.]There’s an observation that’s been circulating online in various forms for several years. It goes something like, “The Internet has allowed the village idiots in every village to form their own village of just idiots.”
Humans need community. I’m no fan of organized religion, but it provided that, and in a way that didn’t (usually) amplify the worst elements of society. The trash fire we live in today is correlated with this decline in churchgoing. (See also the landmark pop-sociology book Bowling Alone.)
[Friend posts meme, “Do you ever look at old photos when you thought you were fat but you really weren’t and now you actually are fat and wishing you were fat like back then?”]The flip side: ten years from now think of how much you’ll like the way you looked today. Why not appreciate it today instead of ten years from now?
[David Gerrold posts meme, “The amount of energy needed to refute BS is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” Example: “the moon is made of cheese.”]Better than “bullshit!” or “prove it!” is, “Hm, maybe you’re right. Or maybe it’s made out of rock. How might we tell which is right?”
[Ahead of our high school reunion, friend asks for recollections about the day we all took the citywide entrance exam.]I remember being mystified by a question that went something like, “You open a book to page 17. Is it on the right-hand side or the left?” It relies on the observation that odd-numbered pages are on the right. I guess it was meant to weed out kids who didn’t read much? But I read a lot and simply had never made that observation. When, after the test, I asked about that question and learned the answer (and that everyone else seemed to know it), I was a little outraged. I guess I still kind of am because it’s the only thing from the test that I remember.
The ironic thing is that my dad worked at a bookbindery and had taught me a lot about how books are physically produced.
[Friend wonders how his social-media platform decided to advertise a “vaginal dilator” to him.]Mother’s Day is right around the corner.
[Friend posts photos of walking among bright-white dunes of gypsum.]https://www.omnibusproject.com/354
Two decades of raising this guy.I knew I’d have a lot to teach him.
I didn’t know how much I’d learn.

Happy birthday, Archer!
[Friend posts link about steaming rather than boiling eggs.]I’ve been steaming eggs for many years. The main benefit isn’t that they’re easier to peel. Maybe they are, but it’s still sometimes hard. No, the main benefit is that you need only a much smaller amount of water. Only an inch or so in the pot will do. It comes to a boil much faster and requires less energy. Once it’s boiling, reduce heat to medium-low (for more energy savings, and to not boil the water away), add your eggs, cover the pot, count to 12 minutes, then remove them to an ice bath.
Or you could follow the instructions in You Suck At Cooking’s video from April 1st. https://youtu.be/49hl4lpWmiU
Netflix’s Three-Body Problem uses math and science the way movie serials of the 1930s used yellowface: as a placeholder to excuse every kind of nonsense without explaining any of it.I want my binge time back.
- To be fair, this probably captures most people’s real-world experience of math and science, though that’s the opposite of what they’re for.
- Put it this way: Field of Dreams is a story about a man’s unresolved issues with his late father. But it is set in the realm of baseball, and because of that, it communicates a few really interesting things about baseball, not to mention a palpable love of the game. That’s a big part of its charm.I went into Three-Body Problem knowing that it’s set in the realm of physics and hoping for some of the same treatment. It wouldn’t have taken much. It’s depressing to hear that there’s some of that in the book, because that means they worked to scrub it completely from the filmed version. Alas.
My dog watches every step of my meal prep intently, with a look on her face that seems to say, “What are you waiting forrrrrr? It’s good alreadyyyyyyy.”
[Friend posts about the USB charging ports now available on some New York City buses.]Beware of “juice jacking.” Consider using a data-blocking adapter or a charge-only cable. https://www.fcc.gov/juice-jacking-tips-to-avoid-it
- Why we can’t have nice things, reason number kajillion
[Friend posts about the worm in RFK Jr’s brain and his mercury poisoning.]#nottheonion
Reminds me of the scene in Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You when the unaccountably conservative young son in a liberal family, who’s always spouting hateful ideology, collapses and is found to have had a brain tumor all along.
A syllable for
Ev’ry year that you’ve been gone
Miss you a lot, Mom
Women would rather be alone in the woods with Bear, and I can’t blame them.
A Facebook group I belong to reminded me of the existence of this short-lived sci-fi series. Thanks to Escape to Witch Mountain, I was an Ike Eisenmann fan, and thanks to Planet of the Apes, I was a Roddy McDowell fan. So I was pretty into the show during its brief run.Looking at it now, I can only ask: what the hell was wrong with me? Just how low was the bar for TV entertainment in 1977? https://youtu.be/fqKEENAGSBo
[Friend posts punny meme: Madagascar (with a cartoon scowl); Gladagascar (with a cartoon smile); Sadagascar; etc.]Radagast car. (h/t Google Gemini)
In 1990’s Short Time, Burt Simpson (a badly timed name – “The Simpsons” was just starting to get big) is a mediocre cop who is mistakenly told he has a terminal illness. Hoping to be killed in the line of duty for the death benefit his family will receive, he becomes a heroic supercop! (And, spoiler alert: repeatedly fails to be killed, and learns a new appreciation for his life and family along the way.)In one scene he bravely walks into a hostage situation in a convenience store to talk down a bomber who wants to blow himself up and his hostages with him.
Simpson: Go ahead and blow yourself up if you want. Sure gonna be missing a lot. Do you have any kids?
Bomber: Nicky and Mikey.
Simpson: Nicky and – how old are they?
Bomber: Three and a half and five.
Simpson: Well if you’re gone, who’s gonna see they graduate high school? How are you gonna find out whether they found a nice girl? Whether Mikey’s stutter ever cleared up?
Bomber: Mikey doesn’t stutter!
Simpson: I understand. But just saying he did. There’s so much… there’s so many things you wouldn’t even notice until they’re gone. Like, Nicky – can Nicky ride a bike?
[Bomber shakes head “no.”]
Simpson: Don’t you wanna teach him to ride a bike? Or see him get his braces? Finally touch the top of that door jamb?
Bomber: How do you know about the door jamb!
Simpson: Pal, come on. You may think you know him but I bet you don’t even know who his teacher is. Or the names of the monsters in his room. [becoming reflective] Or why he buried his shoes that time. Or why he made you call him “Peter” for a whole month.

RIP Dabney Coleman.
Han Solo is the Fonzie of Star Wars. Discuss.
- [May 25th, its actual release anniversary; not the dumb, punny “May the 4th.”]Also, happy actual Star Wars day!
- [Friend posts, “the image of Henry Winkler in carbonite will now haunt me.”]The Fonz got frozen in a different way, as I’m sure you’ll recall.
- Oh hang on, I forgot all about this.
- [Friend asks whether Han Solo jumps a shark.]Do space slugs count?
- [Friend claims Han Solo is more like Bob Falfa from American Graffiti.]I’m afraid I have to disagree.
The Simpsons did it first.
- [Friend asks whether I also picked up some “corn nog.”]Sorry, this response is long overdue. https://youtu.be/Dj5mJGyoYIM
[Friend posts photo of an item in a store: “Super Knief.”]It’s a knife for a thief.
[Friend posts an exchange about Nelson Mandela with an 11-year-old, who is impressed.]Reminds me of this exchange at the wax museum with my then-six-year-old:
“That’s Gandhi, he was an important leader in India. He helped show people how to get what they want through peace instead of fighting.”

“How? With puppy-dog eyes?”
[Friend challenges others to make a movie title “less intense”: “The Empire Strikes a Deal,” “Interview With an Umpire,” etc.]The Godcousin
“Most underrated” joins “changed forever” and “iconic” as an overused and meaningless headline cliche. How can something with a 100% rating be “underrated”? smdhhttps://www.tomsguide.com/entertainment/netflix/netflix-just-got-one-of-maxs-most-underrated-shows-and-its-100-on-rotten-tomatoes
- That said, do check out Scavengers Reign. At 100% it is not overrated.
[Friend posts a sign whose bad kerning makes it look like “The Wig & Penis Open For Business.”]I’ll bet you’d get a big kick out of the r/theyknew subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/theyknew/. Sample attached. Warning: lots of wildly inappropriate content.
How it started; how it’s going.
Every time there’s a reasonable Supreme Court decision, I wonder what bombshell they’re softening us up for. [Turns out it was for the presidential immunity ruling.]
Spent thirty-five of these forty years [since the release of Buckaroo Banzai] wondering about the swingin’ blues number that the Hong Kong Cavaliers begin to play (before Buckaroo abruptly halts the performance), then learned it’s their cover of 1951’s “Rocket 88,” considered to be the first rock and roll song, not to mention an homage to HB-88, the Hikita-Banzai Jet Car.
- [Friend suggests going to the 40th-anniversary screening.]Not just yes, not just hell yes, but OH HELL YES.
- [Friend prompts, “Where are we going?”]PLANET TEN!
- [Friend prompts, “When?”]THE THIRD WEEK OF JULY!
- [Friend wishes she could join us but will instead spend that week at the beach with family.]Must grudgingly admit that sounds better than Buckaroo Banzai.
Originalism my ass.A chief executive above the law is exactly what the Founders rebelled against.
With the end of the Chevron Deference, courts now have the power to tell executive-branch agencies to stop what they do or change how they do it.But with presidential immunity, Biden can order those agencies to ignore court orders without repercussion.
Yesterday was my day for despair. Today’s the day to get back up.The path to totalitarianism is broader and straighter today than it was a week ago. The path away from it is narrow and tricky. The odds are against us, but they’re not 0. They will be if we do nothing.
So today’s day one of my new DEED program: Donate Etc. Every Day. One donation, and one other thing, to rescue American democracy. Today’s donation was to https://www.indivisible.org/ Today’s “etc.” is to share two pithy observations that powerfully explain how we got here:

1. “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

2. “When you are accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”

Please consider doing your own DEEDs. There is only us to save us.
Today’s NY Times front page:“Biden’s Lapses Are Said to Be Increasingly Common and Worrisome”
“Democrats Go Public With Panic About Biden Amid Fears of Electoral Debacle”
“The Question President Biden Needs to Ask Himself. Now.”
“L.B.J. Did It in 1968. Biden Can Do It, Too.”
“Do the Right Thing, Joe”

Headlines about the vigor Biden has shown in events since the debate: zero.

Headlines about the certainty of chaos and defeat if the party abandons the candidate in July with no clear successor or process for choosing one: zero.

Headlines about Trump’s age, mental decline, lies, felony convictions, totalitarian plans for a second term, etc.: zero.

It’s 2024’s “but her emails.” And your Wordle habit is enabling it.
“Make America Great Again” implies there was a time when America was great, and we should get back to it.I hope the MAGAs understand that there is no longer any “again.” America never had an imperial president before. Whatever earlier “great” America they long for, we’re not on the path to it.
The donation part of today’s DEED (Donate, Etc., Every Day) was to MoveOn.The etc. part was to sign up for “textbanking” and letter-writing campaigns.
Talk is cheap. Take action.
My love for her will never cease
Nor ever can that love decrease
And now I see by my timepiece
Today’s the birthday of my niece!Happy birthday McKenna!
I did another DEED (Donate, Etc., Every Day).Donation: the ACLU. I dithered a bit on this one, because their whole thing is using the law to protect the Constitution, and the Supreme Court has rendered that proposition a little questionable. But they put their weight behind the idea of a constitutional amendment to undo the presidential-immunity ruling, and that made it a no-brainer.
Etc.: Reminding you (and myself) that the doom narrative in the media is exactly that: a narrative, one that’s good for their business model. It’s not reality – or at least, it’s only a slice of it. For a pretty good rundown of the anti-doom side of reality, see e.g. https://www.facebook.com/david.gerrold/posts/pfbid032Hknmrk3FyW1pCE5bQhM16MR2cBpcxgs74Q1ZTYUV9Ke2yru69aMhQWLhW1JdHD9l

Also this observation: https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1dugmnk/comment/lbgj1rk/

Don’t let “I’m afraid we’ll lose” become “we’ll lose.” Do some DEEDs.
[Friend posts this “brain cleanser.”]Goddamn.
You know, so many of the institutions that are supposed to be what makes America great – politicians, the media, corporations, police – are rotten.

But look past that. So much else about this country is stirring and wondrous.
In my headcanon, once the Declaration of Independence was signed, this was the dessert they enjoyed at the afterparty.
Today’s DEED (Donate, Etc., Every Day): a donation to Swing Left, specifically its “2024 Impact Fund”; and this observation:In June of 2016, the U.K. voted for Brexit. To everyone paying enough attention, it was an obvious own-goal, the result (we later learned) of a shadowy Russian disinformation campaign to boost divisive, far-right politics in its adversary nations to weaken them. The reaction here was, “You poor dumb bastards” – and yet, a few months later, we followed them by succumbing to our own Russian disinformation campaign and electing Donald Trump.
Well, the U.K. has just voted the Labour party into power in a landslide, banishing the far right to the political wilderness. May we follow them a few months from now once again.
https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-election-final-mega-polls-predict-total-tory-annihilation-labour-win/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/search/?q=brexit
Today’s donation was to the Sister District Project, as part of my DEED (Donate, Etc., Every Day).Today’s Etc. was a workout at the gym (a habit I’ve been working to reestablish these past several days). If things go badly this November, it will take strength in both body and mind to resist assaults on our freedom.
Your donation and etc. may be different from mine, but if you do some DEEDs along with me, then maybe we won’t need to resist any assaults.
I just donated to the reelection campaign of my representative, Congressman Jared Huffman, as part of today’s DEED (Donate, Etc., Every Day).Not only is he a reliable progressive leader, but he has won the American Humanist Association’s “Humanist of the Year” award, he cofounded the Congressional Freethought Caucus, and he is now leading the Stop Project 2025 Task Force.
Today’s Etc. is to remind those calling for President Biden to exit the presidential race of the principle that one should never complain without being able to propose an alternative. Biden should drop out, and Harris should run? Biden should drop out, and Gavin Newsom should run? Biden should drop out, and Gretchen Whitmer should run? OK, fine, make your case. But don’t just say Biden should drop out.
I just donated to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit dedicated to racial justice and combating hate groups. It was the D part of today’s DEED (Donate, Etc., Every Day).For the E part, let’s hear it for France, where voters turned out in epic numbers to reject the far right, just a few days after England did the same (and a year after Spain, as Heather Cox Richardson noted in her article last night)!
Me, age 30 (showering): Gee, that’s a lot of hair going down the drain. Welp, there’s plenty more where that came from!Republican voters, today: Gee, that’s a lot of constitutional rights going down the drain. Welp, there’s plenty more where those came from!
Let me make [the regressiveness of the Social Security tax] a little clearer:If you earn an average salary, you pay 6.2% of it to Social Security, every paycheck, all year long. Overall you end up paying 6.2% of all your income.
But if you earn more – $250,000, say – then thanks to the limit on the Social Security tax, you pay 6.2% on every paycheck until September, when you max out – and then nothing the rest of the year! Overall you end up paying 4.1% of your annual income.

If you’re an average S&P 500 CEO, you pay 6.2% to Social Security every paycheck for part of January, then nothing the rest of the year. You end up paying less than 1% of your annual income.

And if you’re Elon Musk, you max out on your very first paycheck of the year, paying a fraction of 1% on that and then nothing the rest of the year. You’ve paid a whopping 0.0002% of your income to Social Security. The average salary earner pays 25,000 times that.
Hello my friend, I’m in your feed
Presenting you another DEED
If how to cope you need a way
Then Donate, Etc., Every DayToday’s donation was to RepresentUs, “America’s leading nonpartisan anti-corruption organization fighting to fix our broken and ineffective government.”

Today’s Etc. is to commend this subreddit to your attention: https://www.reddit.com/r/OptimistsUnite/

It’s important to keep on top of the news, with all the challenges we face requiring our knowledge and action. But to remain motivated it’s also important to see that taking action can produce terrific outcomes – a fact you might overlook on a diet of only conventional news sources.
DEED (Donate, Etc., Every Day) for Wednesday:I donated to EMILYs List, a non-profit dedicated to getting Democratic women elected to local, state, and national office.
For today’s Etc. I would like to challenge you. My purpose in doing these DEEDs is threefold:

– It is my duty to protect our democracy by all means within my ability
– It helps me cope with our frightening political situation
– I wish to inspire others to act similarly

Have you acted similarly? If so, thank you. If not, why not, and what can I do to further inspire you?
[Friend posts graph of EV cars overtaking combustion-engine cars in China for affordability.]“An idling gas engine may be annoyingly loud, but that’s the price you pay for having WAY less torque available at a standstill.”
https://xkcd.com/2948/
[Wife posts photo of The Mirage, slated for demolition, and the “Siegfried and Roy Drive” street sign.]We’ll always have The Simpsons’ “Gunter and Ernst.”
Friday DEED (Donate, Etc., Every Day): I upgraded my subscription to Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack newsletter from free to paid.On a near-daily basis, Dr. Richardson provides context and analysis about the day’s news that the major media outlets fail to supply. It has been one of my most indispensable information sources for years. Paying to support it is long overdue.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/
- For those paying attention: yes, I missed doing a DEED yesterday. But for a great reason: I took my son to a baseball game on a perfect summer day.
[David Gerrold posts a context-free photo of a foresty wooded spot.]Straining to spot the Predator
RIP Dr. Ruth, who said out loud what we were all already thinking about eating ice cream cones.
For today’s DEED (Donate, Etc., Every Day), I donated to the reelection campaign of President Biden.I have been on the fence about this. Like most of us, I lament the worrisome signs of aging he has shown, and wonder if he is our best candidate.
What it came down to, for me, is knowing that any other candidate would necessarily spend the remaining few months of the campaign aggressively attacking Trump – which I fear would undermine what the silent majority longs for: plain decency and competence. Biden has a boatload of both.
[BlueSky reply to post claiming sandwiches aren’t worth the effort.]Counterpoint: A Really Good Tomato Sandwich | Kenji’s Cooking Show
In the movie Bob Roberts, the campaign of a reprehensible conservative presidential candidate stages a failed assassination attempt against him to boost his popularity.
- Just popped into my head for some reason.
[Trump-supporting friend posts about the shot taken at Trump, says it’s Biden’s fault for comparing Trump to Hitler.]To be fair, Trump has done nothing to discourage comparisons to Hitler. Indeed he seems to tacitly welcome them (“dictator on day one,” “fine people on both sides,” Mein Kampf on his bedstand, etc).
Of the two candidates, only one has condemned political violence.
- [The thread continues.]“The President has labeled Trump as Hitler, evil etc… many many times! What the fuck do you think is going to happen.”
  What you are describing is called “stochastic terrorism”: targeted political violence instigated by hostile public rhetoric directed at a group or individual (per Wikipedia). The instigator gets to maintain a weaselly kind of plausible deniability, knowing that his or her words will, likely as not, stir some deranged person into action.
  
  If you hold Joe Biden responsible for this incident, then do you also hold Donald Trump responsible for, say, the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband (by a right-wing nut who admitted he was looking for Nancy, after years of hostile rhetoric from Trump)?
  
  https://link.motherjones.com/public/35215969
- [More.]“Yes, I put it on the feet of Biden”
  I wonder if you’ve thought this through. For this to be Biden’s fault, you’d have to believe that Thomas Crooks – a dedicated conservative in rural Pennsylvania, from a household with an assault rifle – takes his inspiration from the leader of the Democrats. Does that seem likely to you?
  
  And it’s not like Biden is the only one sounding the alarm about the threat that Trump poses to the Constitution. Far from it. In fact he’s pretty late to the game. Why not blame Nikki Haley? Dick Cheney? Or Donald “I would be a dictator on day one” Trump himself?
- [Someone in the thread thinks Democrats are cheering for the shooter.]“celebrating evil”
  There is nothing in my comments that could be construed as celebration. The same goes for public pronouncements from Democratic leaders, which have all – all – condemned the shooting in particular and political violence in general.
  
  Those facts are inconvenient to those who peddle the narrative that liberals are your enemy. We are not. But that idea is how they derive their political power. They need us divided, not united. America can never be made great that way.
  
  The first thing I did after news of this shooting was to make a donation to Everytown, an organization dedicated to eliminating gun violence. I encourage you to do the same. See? We can make common cause.
- [More.]Hey, before I continue, I want to thank you for continuing to engage with me on these topics. I’m aware that I occasionally make myself an unwelcome guest in your Facebook threads, if not an outright nuisance. I’m sorry about that. But I cannot fathom how Trump supporters think – and I really, really want to. So again, thank you.
  That said: Come on, you’ve got to admit this cartoon is pretty funny.
  
  While you’re crying foul about comparisons between Trump and Hitler, consider that in 1938 Hitler himself was not yet “Hitler, the man responsible for millions of murders and a world war.” But he was well on his way. Everyone could see it was going to be bad. No one had any conception of just how bad it would get.
  
  The question now is, will we learn from history? If we see a lot of parallels between what Hitler was doing then and what Trump is doing now, should we not call them out?
  
  “Do you really think he could become a dictator?”
  
  Absolutely I do. Democracies have turned into dictatorships a number of times, not just in Nazi Germany. The playbook is by now pretty well known, and Trump is executing it.
  
  Of course I hope I’m wrong. But why even take the chance with someone who has stated that exact intention? Who openly admires the world’s worst autocrats, and few others? Doesn’t loyalty to the Constitution demand that we reject a would-be dictator?
- [Thread participant calls out my error about “dedicated conservative.”]I based that on some early reporting I saw about “registered Republican” and some schoolmates’ comments. But reading more about it now, it looks like I was as hasty as those sloppy reporters. Worse, even, since I wrongly claimed he was from rural Pennsylvania. In fact, he was from a Pittsburgh suburb. This makes the question of whether he could have been influenced by Biden’s rhetoric more nuanced, and I withdraw that part of my comments, with apologies.
  (I don’t mean to suggest that rural = Trump and urban/suburban = Biden, only that the likelihoods involved are different. Every place has a spectrum of opinions, but stereotypes exist for a reason.)
  
  Comparisons between Trump and other dictators past and present have been coming, and continue to come, from all directions, and Trump welcomes them, and we should call a spade a spade. I stand by my comments about all of that. Personally I do wish President Biden had stuck with the more gentlemanly approach he showed until recently, even – or especially – if there was no hope of it being reciprocated.
Another day, another DEED (Donate, Etc., Every Day): this time, a donation to Everytown, “the largest gun violence prevention organization in America.”Seemed like the right day for it.
Today I heeded the call of the Democratic Party and donated to it in a demonstration of support on the first day of the Republican national convention, as part of my DEED (Donate, Etc., Every Day).
The corporate news media has been failing us so badly for so long, it’s a wonder anyone pays attention to them anymore. The indispensable Rebecca Solnit has been documenting its focus on the superficial horse-race aspects of this election to the near-total exclusion of the actual, existential issues it will decide.That’s why for today’s DEED (Donate, Etc., Every Day) I have donated to ProPublica, “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force” with a mission of holding power to account.
For today’s Etc. I would like to acknowledge my good fortune in being able to donate (modestly) to a worthy cause every day, and that not everyone is in the same position. Please don’t get discouraged if you’re not. There are so many other ways to contribute. That’s why “Etc.” is part of the DEED acronym.

If you’d like to be part of the solution and are looking for ways to help, I can highly recommend clicking through to any of the organizations I’ve written about these past many days. Most of them list a variety of volunteer opportunities, some of which you can do from the comfort of home.
[David Gerrold reposts a meme advising against engaging with Trump supporters. “Bees don’t argue with flies about why honey is better than shit.”]You don’t change their minds. But there are bystanders, and you can model for them how to engage calmly, intelligently, respectfully, and with humanity – and maybe even a little gentle humor. Don’t let yourself get sucked into arguing over minutiae; stay focused on the big picture. Show that our side is not only the unassailably right one, but also the much nicer place to be. That will do some real good.
Today my DEED (Donate, Etc., Every Day) was a donation to Planned Parenthood, which provides and advocates for sexual and reproductive health care and education.
[Friend posts “You might be old if…” list containing such things as “used a rotary phone,” “ordered from Columbia House,” etc.]Called the theater for movies and showtimes.
Reused a sheet of carbon paper.
Went to Radio Shack to use the tube tester.
Made a necklace from soda-can pop tops.
Threaded film through a projector.
Subscribed to TV Guide.
[Congressman Jared Huffman shares the letter he and several others sent to President Biden asking him to step aside.]I am a Huffman voter, donor, and fanboy, so I do not say this lightly: this is folly. When they joke about the Democratic party being a circular firing squad, this is what they mean.
What was worse: Biden’s poor debate showing, or the weeks of party infighting that followed? Where would the polls be today if the party had spent those weeks trumpeting his accomplishments and plans instead? What an avoidable own goal.

I believe there is a silent majority of voters who want exactly what President Biden – and only President Biden – can offer: plain decency and competence, an antidote to what we’re getting from the other side. Our other possible candidates are tainted by ambition (that somehow the President himself does not convey), even a whiff of which degrades the contrast we must draw with Donald Trump.

I might feel differently if the party were already unified behind a successor, but if we cast Biden aside now we are in for a factional shitshow.

I’m sure you’ve already thought about and discussed all this. Somehow you still concluded that it’s better not only to change horses in midstream but to leap right into the water. Why? Can you do a better job of explaining your reasoning?
- [Huffman replied: “There’s a lot more to it, and I can assure you none of this is done lightly, or reflexively in reaction to media, donors, etc. as some have suggested. I also wouldn’t do it if I wasn’t confident Dems can unite, quickly, around a winning ticket which I think should be led by VP Harris. It’s about choosing your risk, and maximizing chances of winning. Stay tuned.”]Thank you. I really, really, really, really hope you’re right.
- [Friend agrees with my concerns, believes polls are being misread.]A saving grace (for now) is the supposed fact that the overwhelming majority of voters pay little attention to politics until much closer to Election Day. So if there has to be hand-wringing, let’s get it over and done ASAP.
  I do understand the need to galvanize voters and get them to the polls, which perhaps Biden cannot do. I also kind of like the gambit of taking the candidate against whom Fox and the GOP have spent years poisoning minds and swapping him out at the eleventh hour for someone they haven’t. If only so much didn’t ride on it.
- [A little while later.]I take it all back. This is starting to look like a canny move of historic proportions. Thank you again!
Today I donated to the Center for American Progress, a non-profit advancing progress policy ideas, working to restore social trust in democracy, and more.I also engaged in a brief exchange with Congressman Jared Huffman’s Cat Truman in the thread on his Facebook post about asking President Biden to exit the race. He assured me that there is method in this madness. I am very tentatively mollified.
Together they were my DEED (Donate, Etc., Every Day) for Friday.
My poor nerves.
Today there could be only one DEED (Donate, Etc., Every Day): I gave to the Kamala Harris presidential campaign (!)
The GOP
[Ruben Bolling (of Tom the Dancing Bug) links to his article about the old Saturday-morning cartoon, Hong Kong Phooey.]“I will warn you, as I was not warned as a ‘70s kid: Once you hear the song, it may live in your head for the rest of your life.”
You left out, ”…and my mere mention of it will activate other ‘70s kids like so many Manchurian Candidates and drive them to madness.”
[Friend who unexpectedly became a farmer writes pun-filled post; e.g. riding a tractor is “harrowing.”]I can’t wait for you to post about this again. Till next time!
- [Days later, friend gets it.]Delayed pun realization is best pun realization. It’s like I planted it and it needed time to ripen! Sow satisfying! [Friend adds his wife was the one who got the joke. “You have her fertile mind to thank for your pun bearing fruit. Left to me, it would have withered on the vine.”]
At the suggestion of Rebecca Solnit, today’s DEED (Donate, Etc., Every Day) was a donation to https://grassrootsdems.org/
[Reply to BlueSky post about Kamala Harris’s cooking.]Whoa, flashback to 1992 when Hillary Clinton was forced to walk back her derisive “I could have stayed home and baked cookies” comment by submitting to a humiliating “bake-off” against Barbara Bush.
This is so much better.
Happy Monday! Here, have a fun quiz. Match the partners to their TV shows.A. Tony and Roger
B. Gage and Desoto
C. Shawn and Gus
D. Felix and Oscar
E. David and Maddie
F. Jimmy and Bunk
G. Sam and Diane
H. Ralph and Ed
J. Ponch and Jon
K. Patsy and Edina
L. Kelly and Scotty
M. Sam and Al
N. Buz and Tod
P. Crockett and Tubbs
Q. Max and 99
R. Pete, Linc, and Julie
S. Toody and Muldoon
T. Walter and Jesse
U. Tim and Martin
V. Mulder and Scully
W. Fred and Barney
X. Steed and Mrs. Peel

1. The Mod Squad
2. Moonlighting
3. The Odd Couple
4. Car 54, Where Are You?
5. Cheers
6. Get Smart
7. I Dream of Jeannie
8. Breaking Bad
9. Miami Vice
10. Psych
11. The Wire
12. Route 66
13. Emergency!
14. Absolutely Fabulous
15. The X-Files
16. The Flintstones
17. I Spy
18. The Avengers
19. ChiPs
20. The Honeymooners
21. Quantum Leap
22. My Favorite Martian
- [Bob Glickstein commented on his own post.]Bonus points: supply full character names (where possible). No cheating!
- [Friend submits comment about too much mental capacity taken up with this info along with her answer; wonders why no “I” or “O.”]I, too, clearly have too much brain space devoted to useless TV arcana.
  I and O look like one and zero. Plus, leaving them out allowed me to end on X, the most mysterious letter.
[Friend posts photo of a funny typo on a sign: “Do not secure bike to feces.”]Not sure I agree with this advice. I mean, who’s going to steal that bike?
Ways to interpret “You won’t have to vote again in four years”:1. After my second term the Constitution prohibits me from serving a third. It can’t benefit me so what the hell do I care if you vote?
2. I will effect changes to our elections so those nasty Democrats can never again imperil Republican minority rule.

3. I know voting is a burden but I’m in deep trouble and if you do this one thing for me I promise I’ll never ask anything of you again.

None of these is OK.
Today’s DEED (Donate, Etc., Every Day): donated again to the Harris campaign, to help with their end-of-month goal and to make up for missing the White Dudes For Harris event yesterday.
[David Gerrold reposts this.]Putting my quill back in my goose.
To this day, when I watch this clip and Carl Sagan says, “That’s the right answer,” I get goosebumps. https://youtu.be/G8cbIWMv0rI
- I sure miss him.
Just as I was finally coming to grips with one giant mystery, a newer, bigger one has reared its head.The old one: how Donald Trump’s bullying, whining, entitled, profane, mendacious, misanthropic, contradictory, anti-patriotic, and nakedly self-interested act motivated so many followers.
The new one: how that power, upon which Trump could reliably call for nine long years and which remained undiminished no matter what we did, has now evaporated in the blink of an eye.

Did someone cast a ring into some fire somewhere?
- There’s still plenty to do. Take nothing for granted!
- [Friend asks whether that power has in fact evaporated.]Depends on whether you believe this New Yorker cartoon.
[Dylan Marron shows off the paperback edition of his “Conversations With People Who Hate Me.”]No one thing saves the world. Lots of little things do. This is one of those.
Republican operatives contemplating shenanigans to throw November’s election to Donald Trump have an interesting prisoner’s-dilemma situation shaping up. As the likelihood of a Harris-Walz victory increases, so does the possibility that any election-related lawlessness will be investigated and prosecuted afterward. If all the operatives in all the states hang together, they can probably pull it off! But only probably. There’s still some risk of prison. Meanwhile, the first few who defect can save themselves from that risk by giving up their plans and collaborators.What do you suppose they’ll do? I guess that depends on whether there’s honor among thieves.
A lot is being made of how joyful Kamala Harris is on the campaign trail, in stark contrast to her opponent.And now I remember 1976, when the main feature of (former peanut farmer) Jimmy Carter’s campaign was his giant smile – so much so that his home town of Plains, Georgia erected a smiling-peanut statue in his honor.
Sometimes the country just needs a great big smile.
[Repost from 2017.] A reminder that Kamala impressed me years before she was ever on a presidential ticket.
- For some reason, resharing this “Facebook memory” omitted my comment from seven years ago, which was, “Senator Harris gets it ”
[Friend reposts this.]You’re not crying, I’m crying.
[Friend comments that astrologers, subjected to scientific experimentation, performed “worse than random.”]Wait, there is no “worse than random,” is there? When something is random, it has no predictive power. Better than random means you can trust its predictions to be right some of the time. If it’s worse than random, that means you can trust its predictions to be wrong some of the time, which allows you to rule out some outcomes – which is better than random.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Vo8dSsbIppg
Robert Reich makes a great point here: Musk’s great wealth allows him to distort our politics, and we’re subsidizing that through our taxes, some of which go to lucrative government contracts that pay him. If he’s not willing to leave the playing field level, we should be unwilling to employ him.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/time-to-stop-musk
[Friend posts photo of box containing old-style fanfold dot-matrix-printer paper, asks if anyone needs some.]No, but I’ll pay you $.10 for every page whose perforated tractor-feed strips you let me tear off.
[Friend posts meme, “I’m so glad we went from “When they go low, we go high” to “Girl, hold my earrings while I drag this weird mf.””]You can have it both ways. There is nothing “low” about fighting bullies.
[Reply to BlueSky post, “Donald has had a pretty rough month or so.”]We’re not even yet.
<https://youtu.be/b005iHf8Z3g>
Dan Rather’s newsletter called Trump’s Arlington stunt “a new low,” and my first thought was, “That’s like trying to get to the bottom of the Mandelbrot set.”https://youtu.be/b005iHf8Z3g
[Former classmate Allison Pugh, author of “The Last Human Job,” posts this link that mentions her book.]This reminded me of something I wrote for the Risks Digest long, long ago, when Internet newsletters were still distributed by email because the Web had not yet been invented.
(The Risks Digest is a forum for discussions about the risks posed by technology. It’s been going since 1985!)

http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/8/37#subj5.1

Robert Steven Glickstein <bobg+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Wed, 8 Mar 89 18:05:20 -0500 (EST)

An observation that I made earlier today:

I entered a store in the neighborhood with an old-fashioned mechanical cash register, complete with the little “I just made a sale” bell. I purchased an item and after the transaction was complete, the clerk thanked me and wished me a good afternoon. I returned the pleasantry.

Later on I was in a much larger store, complete with barcode readers and electronic cash registers with dot-matrix LED displays. As the clerk rang up my purchase, the cash register told me “Thank You For Shopping At <Foo>” and my receipt said “Have a Good Day”. Perhaps because the dreary task of being pleasant to customers was now automated, the clerk felt no need to greet me, address me, look at me, or in any way acknowledge me except to take my money and shove some change into my hand.

Computers do a lot of jobs a lot better than people, but there are some tasks that should be performed by no one but humans.

Bob Glickstein, Information Technology Center, CMU, Pittsburgh, PA
At this point in 2016 we were all saying, “Stick a fork in Trump, he’s done.”There was a constant stream of scandals, flubs, and general unseriousness. He didn’t even seem to be campaigning to win – it was just a novel avenue for his usual hucksterism. When he actually did win, he was as surprised as anyone.
That’s because he had surrogates, allies, and wealthy patrons who _were_ serious. And he has them this time too.

The election is definitely winnable but don’t think for a moment it’s not also loseable.
The very sound of his voice drove me to KamalaHarris.com to donate some money. Ahhh, that’s better.
http://kamalaharris.com/
- AAAAA++++++ would donate again, can recommend
If Merriam-Webster fails to declare “sanewashing” the word of the year, I will find a table with their dictionary on it, and flip it.
Harris is behind where Clinton was. Trump is ahead of where he was. And yes, he was saying insane things then too. It didn’t matter – he just had to dominate the news. And he did. And he is.Fight.
[Jewish, Israel-supporting acquaintance believes we need Trump.]Counterpoint:
“Here’s a fun, cool thing those madcap Nazis did in Germany in the 1930s: every time a Jewish person ended up on the wrong side of the law, it was blown up into national news. […]

This constant barrage of “every Jew is a criminal” propaganda was so effective, that by the time the Nazis started carting Jews off to concentration camps, the average German citizen was all what the fuck took you so long?

All of which should make what’s going on in America in 2024 send shivers up every decent person’s spine.”

https://www.jefftiedrich.com/p/fascist-fuckery-intensifies-in-springfield
[David Gerrold reshares tweet wondering how anyone can mistake Trump for a “tough guy alpha male.”]I don’t think anyone is fooled; instead, they’re playing along. He’s craven, profane, enfeebled, indolent, malodorous, and every other uncomplimentary adjective you care to apply; everyone can see that. Yet somehow he makes it all work, apparently through little more than the will to proclaim victory in spite of all evidence.
In this way he is a challenge to the supposed meritocracy in which we live. Are you not thriving in it? It’s a meritocracy, ergo you have only yourself to blame.[*] Secretly you suspect some aspect of yourself is holding you back. Now here comes Trump, who has the fairytale-like power to be worse than you in every dimension – and yet to succeed anyway. You are only too happy to help him pretend he’s the apex of creation because of what it means for your place in the order of things.

[*] – Not true, of course. Merit can be measured in many ways. In our society, some of those count and some don’t. And some that shouldn’t, do.
I was going to write to Congressman Jared Huffman asking for legislation prohibiting government contracts that benefit Elon Musk’s companies. So I went to Google to find Huffman’s web page or email address and instead discovered that Google believes he’s a Republican.(I did click the Feedback link to correct it.)
- The national security concerns regarding Musk’s companies were described by Robert Reich at https://robertreich.substack.com/p/time-to-stop-musk and more recently by Wired at https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-biden-harris-assassination-post-x/
I went to vote.gov. I followed a link to check my voter registration. Took all of one minute. Now it’s your turn!
[Commenting on a post from former child actor Ike Eisenmann.]Second time in two days that “My Dad Lives In a Downtown Hotel” has come up for me. (The first was in a back episode of the You’re Wrong About podcast.) What are the odds!
[Friend posts about Scientific American’s endorsement of Kamala Harris – only their second endorsement in 179 years.]
I’m intelligent enough, most of the time, to suit myself. Also acceptably witty, thoughtful, and compassionate. Once in a while I can be quite clever. There’s always room to improve, of course, but on balance I do pretty well.So why is it that, in idle moments, my brain so often flips open to a random chapter of Times Bob Was An Idiot?
- [Friend comments, “Dunno, but I would buy that book.”]This comment led me to entertain – momentarily – the idea of actually writing it, if only as a way to exorcise certain memories. Then I imagined it actually selling well. DO NOT WANT
[Friend posts photo of sign stating that the rapture will happen on 9-18-2024 (but it didn’t).]Maybe the date is written European style and refers to the ninth of Schmagembruary
[Friend posts chart showing how differently economists feel about various policies compared to ordinary people.]Economists hate Christmas, too. https://www.npr.org/2019/12/16/788587668/the-efficient-christmas-why-economists-hate-gifts
[Friend posts photo of the “Amadeus Cafe’s” menu, which has some musical notes on its cover. Careful inspection reveals it’s the Flintstones theme.]Mozart!
Wolfgang Mozart!
He’s a music guy from history…
[Friend posts about a museum exhibit about Carnegie Mellon University in the 1980’s.](Wonders whether renewed interest in CMU in the 80’s means it’s possible to find more than a single sad photo of Grey Matter, googles hopefully. …No, no it’s not.)
[Friend posts AI-generated photo of cats as the original Star Trek crew. Commenter wonders which one is Spock.]The one with the pointy ears of course.
My Kris Kristofferson guilty pleasure: Millennium, a cheesy sci-fi movie from 1989 that also stars Cheryl Ladd. You can find the whole movie on YouTube. Only 11% on Rotten Tomatoes but for those times when a cheesy sci-fi movie from the 80’s is what you want, it’s perfect.
[Judgmental friend posts about having been “gentle” with a 9/11 inside-job conspiracist.]I’ve had some success with a Socratic approach.
Them: “9/11 was an inside job.”
Me: “Maybe! And maybe not. How might we tell?”
[Friend posts graph showing more Nobel prizes going to more chocolate-consuming countries.]Causation? Or mere correlation? I’m going to increase my chocolate consumption in a noble effort to find out.
- Maybe I’d better not. If I fail to win a Nobel prize, and I publish that result, and then that publication wins me a Nobel, the resulting paradox might destroy the universe.
[Reposting a “Facebook memory”: “Earlier, someone asked me if today’s date was the fourth of October. In confirming that it was, I failed to answer, “10-4.” #regret.”]
This was twelve years ago and I still think about it. A lot.
[Friend posts observation about Elon Musk demonstrating how capitalists align with fascists to preserve their wealth.]I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about how weird and isolating it must be to become astronomically wealthy. You simply can’t maintain the relationships that you previously had; they all become colored by your wealth. What does that do to your personality? Your psychology? Your humanity? Nothing good, I expect. I think about this story that Ringo Starr tells in “The Beatles Anthology”:
“I was at my auntie’s, which I’d been a thousand times before, and we were having a cup of tea one night […] and somebody knocked the little coffee table and my tea went into my saucer and suddenly it was, “He can’t have that! We have to tidy up.” That would never have happened before. I just, I thought, oh, things are changing. I mean, it was an absolute arrow in the brain, you know?”
[Friend reposts “unpopular opinion” meme: “Die Hard is a Harry Potter movie. He sneaks around a tower at night avoiding Alan Rickman.”][waving pistol like a wand] Yippee-ki-yus motherfuckus!
Why has Elon gone full MAGA? He may think it’s his only way of staying out of prison. https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/1fyw23c/comment/lqxzd0b/
[David Gerrold extols the benefits of having moved to Vermont.]Maple horseradish! *books flight to Vermont*
You may think it’s heli-copter, but it’s actually helico-pter – the same pter as in pterodactyl and pteranodon. (It means “wing.”)
- See also “diptera,” the taxonomic order of two-winged insects.
[Reply to a BlueSky post about the futililty of trying to convince people to vote.]“Somewhere you have an archnemesis who is going to vote WRONG. Only you can cancel out their vote by voting right. (Everyone else is busy canceling out their own archnemeses.)”
If it happens routinely, it’s not news.So it’s telling that “Journalist does his fucking job” is the headline here.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/15/politics/video/trump-chicago-economic-club-putin-digvid
I commend these articles to your attention. Tl;dr – Relax, it’s looking good. (But don’t relax too much!)
https://www.jefftiedrich.com/p/the-polls-and-the-press-want-you
https://www.michaelmoore.com/p/do-the-math-trump-is-toast
The Man Who Once Was Six Million Dollars But Adjusted For Inflation Would Now Be Sixty Million Except That Advances In Technology And Increases In Production Make Him More Like Six Hundred Thousand
[Friend posts that Xenophon’s Anabasis is “having a moment.”]I was walking through the Village one evening in the eighties with some HCHS friends and we were trying to identify the parallels between The Warriors and Homer’s Odyssey. A stranger, overhearing, interrupted to explain that it’s not The Odyssey but Xenophon’s Anabasis.
Thank you, random erudite stranger. I have never forgotten you.
When I was born, the real-life Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had been dead for less time than I’ve now been alive.
[Congressman Jared Huffman posts this message from his cat: “Keep working hard, but Truman has this message for Democrats: WE ARE GOING TO WIN!”]From Truman’s mouth to the cat god’s ears.
Robert Reich names the members of the rogues’ gallery.
You know, I’m starting to think that the billionaires may not have our best interests at heart.
When my sister says “Suzanne I am,” she could just as easily and correctly be saying “Suzanne: iamb.” That’s only one of the many remarkable things about her. Happy birthday, Suze!
[Forwarding a lengthy Rebecca Solnit post about voter intimidation at home.] This is a lot of words to say: Women, you can safely vote for Kamala and still tell your husband you voted for Trump.
Floating island of garbage Always the hurricanes blowing
Always the population growing
And the money owing
And the sunlight streaming
And the natives steaming
[Wife posts photo of weird-looking cupcakes she made. “But they tasted just fine, right?” she asks.]I read that as “tested” and my first thought was, “I don’t know, I need more tests.”
[Friend posts about election anxiety.]It’s my dog Pepper’s twelfth birthday. We took a very long walk together. Excellent palliative for election anxiety.
My Congressman wrote:Trump will definitely “declare victory” Tuesday night, even though he’s going to lose. Here in the cesspool of social media, there will be lots of content sowing doubts and supporting Trump. On the ground, MAGA extremists will try to interfere with and stop vote counting. We are going to win, but all of this is coming – be ready.
[Daylight Savings Time ends.]Arrgh, this election just got an hour longer!
Look, I don’t care if you’re avoiding carbs or whatever. If you go to the market on a Sunday morning, you pick up a baguette. You just do. And you let that thing poke proudly out of your shopping bag on the way home.
Pepper the dog: It’s lunchtime.
Me: You have to wait another hour. We moved the clock back overnight.
Pepper (loudly): That is some bullllllshit!
I’m glad Kamala is the nominee. I am. But as the campaign winds down, I’m a little wistful about all the times we didn’t get to hear Joe Biden start a sentence with, “Folks…”
OMG. Do you remember watching this very same silent black-and-white film over and over at Jon’s apartment, [friend 1] and [friend 2]?Also, do you remember narrating parts of it? Specifically, when they mount the ladder to the Millennium Falcon’s guns, for some reason we always said, “Han goes up… and Luke goes down.”
Decades later, when I showed Star Wars to my kids, without any prompting from me they did the exact same thing and blew my mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC70MAYgeu4
It wouldn’t be the first time I owe my safety, security, and happiness to women.
[After the election, a friend writes, “With the eventual heat death of the universe, there will be no record of and no one to remember names like Aristotle, Bach, or even Trump.”]When you have to take solace in the heat death of the universe…
What I wrote to my (grown) kids this morning:There is a lot of good info out there about resisting authoritarianism. Most of it begins with the advice: take care of yourself first. Step one is to process the fear, anger, and disbelief you may be feeling. Take the day to do that however works best for you. What worked best for me in 2016 was to talk it out with my coworkers. We did no work that day. As terrible as the day was, being able to huddle with those folks, all feeling the same feelings together, is one of my fondest memories.
Parents want to leave a better world for their children than the one they knew. When Mom and I were your ages, American civic life was boring. We could ignore politics and pretty much live how we liked. That’s what we hoped for you.

But soon after Trump became president and we were all quickly exhausted by the chaos and the cruelty, I saw that very sentiment expressed in a tweet. (They were still tweets then.) Someone wrote, “I wish I could go back to ignoring politics!” Someone responded, “Imagine being so privileged that you can ignore politics.”

In other words, only some groups ever had the luxury of sticking their heads in the sand, and that’s not a very good world. If I’m honest, I don’t believe a Kamala win last night would have made things more than incrementally better than that. Many less-privileged groups would have continued having to pay very close attention, as we all now must.

We were wrong about the kind of world we wanted you to inherit. You’ll have the responsibility – and the opportunity – to make it actually be better. Take comfort in the knowledge that, one way or another – ways you don’t have to figure out today or even very soon – you will be part of the solution.
[Friend posts election results from his very left-leaning county, marvels it had as many Trump votes as it did.]I saw a blurb somewhere about Google searches for “Did Biden drop out?” spiked on Election Day. There are low-information voters, then there’s this: people who may never even have heard the name Kamala. Faced with a ballot containing “Trump” and several other names, none of them familiar, some not-insignificant number of voters went with Trump by default.
No, I don’t think that made the difference.
They didn’t. Trump got millions of votes fewer than the last time. Remember that.
- As counting of the popular vote has continued, apparently “millions fewer” no longer applies. At this writing it’s about 700,000 fewer. And while in a sane universe, support for Trump should have plummeted, the point still stands: there has been no overall increase in his support.
I know where my country stands. I know where I’d like it to be. The distance between the two seems vast.I know what kind of shape my body is in. I know where I’d like it to be. That distance seems vast too.
Over the years I tried several times to get serious about exercise. I measured my progress. Inevitably the measurements plateaued and I got discouraged, and stopped.

Then I had an epiphany: don’t measure. Just exercise. Trust that in the long run, it’ll pay off. A lot or a little, it doesn’t matter; all that matters is to keep going. Something is better than nothing.

So it is with fixing our country. You don’t have to solve everything. You don’t even have to do a lot. Just keep doing a little. Something is better than nothing. It’ll pay off.
[Friend posts about the paradox of tolerance.]In mathematics, a “set” is a collection of objects satisfying some criteria – e.g., “the socks in my sock drawer” or “all my friends except the one whose surprise party we’re planning.”
Defined naively, the idea of a set easily leads to a contradiction. Consider the set “all my socks.” Call it S. Now consider its complement: “everything that’s not one of my socks.” Call it not-S. Among the things in not-S are lizards, raindrops, colors, and sets – including not-S itself, which after all is not one of my socks.

If a set contains itself, we can call it “abnormal.” Otherwise it’s “normal.”

Now consider the set N, “all normal sets.” Does N contain itself? If it does, then it’s abnormal – but as a member of N it’s required to be normal. On the other hand, if N doesn’t contain itself, it’s normal – but N is required to contain all the sets that are normal, so mustn’t omit itself.

This is called “Russell’s paradox,” after Bertrand Russell, who wrote about it early in the 20th century. He proposed a way to resolve it using the idea of “types” that are arranged in a hierarchy. Each object – a sock, a friend, a set – has a type, and some types are “higher” than others. In particular, if you have a set of elements whose type is T1, then the set itself has a higher type, T2.

In type theory it’s no longer possible to talk about sets that contain themselves: a set can contain items only of lower type than the set itself has. You lose some expressiveness that way, but you also eliminate the paradox.

Likewise with tolerance. The set of things it is necessary to tolerate includes differences in race, gender, etc., but not intolerance, which has the wrong type to belong to such a set.
[Friend posts about the “turkey drop” episode of WKRP.]You must have the edit that removed Pink Floyd’s “Dogs” for licensing reasons, which ruins a joke near the beginning of the episode.
Speaking of the beginning: everyone remembers that punchline, but not how amazing the whole episode is, especially the first act, with Arthur Carlson’s hilarious and kinda heartbreaking desperation to be relevant.
[Friend posts dismal lesson from history.]“If the question is whether Trump will use the military to repress dissent in the first months of his term, or only later, then things are already pretty grim and far gone.”
On the bright[*] side, if this is in fact the conversation, then it is an indication that we’ve learned something from 20th century history. If our imaginations are jumping ahead to the end state of authoritarian rule, we’re that much better prepared to resist movements in that direction.

[*] – I use the term loosely.
At this time of urgent and existential questions, I can’t stop wondering: when we talk about the “first knuckle” and the “second knuckle,” is that counting from the fingertip or from the palm?
This sentiment from eight years ago bears repeating.

“Earlier generations of Americans have had their worthy challenges: throw off monarchy, end slavery, defeat the Axis, etc. We are the coddled and too-comfortable product of their efforts and, in historical terms, haven’t done a single thing to earn our privilege. Trump is both the perfect symbol of that and, at last, our worthy challenge.”
- [Wife remarks, “Can I pick a new challenge? I listened in history class.”]That reminds me of this Tolkien paraphrase that’s been making the rounds.
  “I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
  “LMAO” said Gandalf. “Well it has.”
[Trump-supporting Jewish friend posts about rising anti-Semitism in Europe. Commenter points out that Trump “winks” at it. Trump-supporting friend denies it.]Wikipedia: “In November 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center acquired more than 900 emails Stephen Miller sent Breitbart News writer Katie McHugh between 2015 and 2016. The emails became the basis for an expose that showed that Miller had enthusiastically pushed the views of white nationalist publications such as American Renaissance and VDARE, as well as the far-right conspiracy website InfoWars, and promoted The Camp of the Saints, a French novel circulating among neo-Nazis, shaping both White House policy and Breitbart’s coverage of racial politics.”
Miller is a white supremacist and will be Trump’s deputy chief of staff. I’d say that qualifies as “winking at Nazis.”
One big problem with an electoral defeat such as we suffered this month is that it diffuses our power. Before, there was one set of ideas and strategies we more or less all followed, and that unity was power. Now there are numerous would-be leaders, competing explanations for what went wrong, and a kaleidoscope of ideas for moving forward.It’s hard to make sense of it all, let alone get everyone moving in the same direction again. It would be good to focus on just those resources that are the most useful. Here are the ones I like best. Hope this helps. https://sites.google.com/view/bobs-lib-hub
After today, Andrea Glickstein and I will never again be able to say that we’ve been married for less than a quarter of a century.
[Reply to BlueSky post lamenting that Trump’s rich friends won’t suffer the consequences of their actions.]Sure they will – by having to exist in an impoverished society.
[Reply to BlueSky post saying, “Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse…”]For the record, I didn’t think it couldn’t get worse.
Do you work at X, Tesla, SpaceX, or Starlink? Do you feel… not great… about helping to further enrich Elon Musk? Are you not at liberty to resign in protest?Well, don’t put any lives at risk, but: do a crappy job. Slow-roll the work. Overcomplicate things. Bog it all down.
- Are you a manager at X, Tesla, SpaceX, or Starlink? Protect your low performers. They may be low-performing for a reason that has nothing to do with their abilities.
Not too interested in looking backward or asking “what if.” But what if we’d done this and put an end to Trump’s legal worries? Would he even have felt the need to run again? Especially in light of the listlessness of the Justice Dept. over the past four years I can’t help but wonder if we’d be better off today.
In charge of government efficiency: the one man better able than any other in history to make his problems go away by throwing more money at them.
Your reminder that about 7 in 10 eligible voters did not choose Trump.Unfortunately, about 4 in 10 eligible voters did not choose anyone and so here we are.
[Reply to BlueSky post about the Trump cabinet taking shape.]Looking forward to the version of this that has red X’s over half the faces because Trump has thrown them under the bus.
<https://www.youtube.com/clip/UgkxxJwPreDxBjhO05ORjKSnby64Bvp-OOAy>
[Reply to BlueSky post claiming “half of America” are rage-fueled Trump cultists.]At most three in ten, actually, and much less when you consider that very many Trump votes were cast by ordinary folks operating on shockingly low information.
The problem isn’t that there are so many Americans like this. The problem is that the ones there are have been able to unite.
- In other words…
Artists strive to create a work of sufficient complexity that you get something new out of it each time you revisit it.But somehow I doubt this is what they have in mind:
Rewatching The Sopranos a quarter-century later on a much larger TV than was originally possible, I only just became aware that the B’s in the “Bada Bing” club’s sign are breasts, and have nipples.
After all the unmaking and the suffering to come, there will follow rebuilding and renewal.And some Republican’s going to take the damn credit.
Now if only there were an open-protocol successor to SpaceX too.
[Reply to BlueSky post reporting that Trump plans to use the military to conduct deportations.]What every journalist should be asking but of course won’t: What will be the rules of engagement?
- [As others on the thread fret.]Less “Oh no!”
  More “Fuck no!”
[Reply to a BlueSky post about Zoom, the 1970’s kids’ TV show.]F! A! Double-n, double-e! D, double-o! L, double-e!
[Wife posts, “Bomb Cyclone? Atmospheric River? Triple Bombogenesis? I dunno but “torrential rain, hurricane-force winds expected” does the job for me.”]Childhood simpler
“Triple bombogenesis”
Was “wind and rain storm”
Republicans have such an easy path to continuing electoral success: rather than enact Project 2025 and create suffering and hardship, just let Biden’s programs continue – and then take credit for the benefits they bring to everyone.But that wouldn’t serve Putin’s goal of disuniting America, so 🤷‍♂️
If I had a tail, it would wag too when my dog comes near.
[Reply to BlueSky post suggesting citizens pass a civics test before being allowed to vote.]Go ahead and tell us who should design it and how it should be administered to avoid introducing an altogether different bias. We’ll wait.
Individuals are, by and large, idiots. The Framers knew that. The wisdom of the crowd is nevertheless a very real thing – when oligarchs aren’t manipulating it.
[Participating in a BlueSky trend.]Optimist: The glass is half full.
Pessimist: The glass is half empty.
Father of two bickering children: You can each have half of the full part and half of the empty part.
“There’s some part of me that twinges with a sense of insufficiency when I think about doing something small-scale […] but if your goal is to care for the world, and in a given moment you’re deeply caring for one person, you’re doing the best it’s possible to do.”Care doesn’t scale
“Now, [Fly Agaric] is a mushroom and psychoactive fungus known for triggering a hallucinogenic experience. You might think this is an odd thing to be written on the keyboard of an emergency destruction system. You would be correct.”Alien
[Reply to BlueSky post calling folks out for wishing bird flu or any other disease on antivaxxers.]Not only that, but thanks to how contagion works, every one of your enemies who gets sick increases the threat faced by you and your friends.
We’re all in this together, even if we’re the only ones who get that we’re all in this together.
I don’t know what conservatives are complaining about. They can join Bluesky, no problem. They just need to behave in a way that doesn’t get them blocked. You know, engaging respectfully with others. If that’s beyond them, that’s not on Bluesky.
I’m as pissed off about the complicit sanewashing news media as anyone.But it’s been dying in front of our very eyes ten different ways for about a quarter century now. We can wish and hope for it to meet this moment with the vigor it had in the 1970’s, but let’s be real.
Mom would have been ninety today. Ninety! If she were here today, she would be thrilled to know her children and grandchildren were spending the week together.She probably would also finally have had to give up the claim of being twenty-nine.
[Reply to a BlueSky post saying, “an old memo at the Department of Justice is what allowed Trump to get away with insurrection and stealing top secret documents.”]Kinda like the note written by some court reporter in 1886 that somehow became the basis for our doctrine of corporate personhood.
Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. – Wikipedia
[Friend writes that Solvang, California is “a little campy and touristy, but it’s super fun.”]“But”? I think you mean “and.”
[Reply to BlueSky post criticizing the millions who didn’t vote. “What does it take to show up every couple of years?”]Some of the things it takes:
– Polling places nearby
– Transportation to and from
– Voting lines that aren’t hours long
– Time off work to vote
– Not being culled in overbroad purges of voting rolls

…not all of which everyone has.
[Reply to BlueSky post, “Abolishing the Department of Education has to be one of the dumbest ideas of my lifetime.”]Unless the goal is to destroy faith in government, which it is. Stop being so surprised all the time, everyone.
[Reply to BlueSky post explaining that Watergate was a scandal because “even Republicans” didn’t think the president should be a king.]That generation had lived through a catastrophic global war against fascism.
In the 90’s I was debating a friend about whether the U.S. would be better off with a European-style parliamentary democracy, with proportional representation instead of our winner-takes-all two-party system. “Nah,” I concluded. “The proof’s in the pudding: we have historic peace and prosperity.”
[In BlueSky thread about the South Korean president’s failed coup attempt.]“I will diminish, and go into the West.”
I started the day feeling pretty doom-y, tbh.But then S. Korea thwarted an authoritarian coup. And it looks like Hegseth’s nomination might be circling the drain.
Thank you, defenders of democracy. May you be able to count on me when you need it the way I just did on you.
[Reviving a Facebook thread from 2012 in which some friends helped me remember the name of a “watery orange drink” from my childhood.]I got reminded of this old post yesterday by Facebook Memories. In the years since, I did find one place on the Internet that still remembers Sun Dew – with photos of a (now decrepit) half-pint carton! https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/vintage-sun-dew-orange-drink-jamaica-4705420585
From the ingredient list it looks like Sun Dew is just frozen concentrated orange juice, reconstituted with too much water, with sugar and citric acid added to make up the flavor difference. I’m going to experiment with mixing my own and see how close I can come to [friend’s] “not good” sense memory. Will report back.
- After some experimentation, I can report that if you mix 200g of water for every 20g of frozen concentrated orange juice (about 1/4 normal strength), plus 20g of sugar and 1g of citric acid, you will pretty closely replicate what I dimly remember the flavor of Sun Dew to be.
FTFY
NYPD detectives: “Get me a list of everyone denied a claim by United Healthcare.”
[Reply to BlueSky post pointing out that Elon Musk’s call to “defund the ACLU” is idiotic because (among other things) the ACLU receives no public funds.]youtube.com/clip/UgkxZdF…
[Reply to BlueSky post about its upcoming subscription service.]Looking forward to being the customer, not the product.
[Reply to BlueSky post about a programmer’s skepticism on learning Go.]Every new language provokes rage at its design. The wise developer ignores this feeling for six months, knowing the energy is better spent absorbing new idioms.
[Reply to BlueSky post advocating a 100% tax on wealth above a billion dollars.]Even better: the ceiling on how rich you can be is some fixed multiple of the floor for how poor you can be.
Now those who want to be richer are incentivized to raise that floor.
Two things I said in 2020 Biden should have done:- Weekly “fireside chat” YouTube videos. Voters would have known him and his record better going into this election.
– Pardon Trump, who would then not have felt so compelled to run again. It’s not like not pardoning him got us anything.
- That doesn’t mean I agree with Clyburn about pardoning Trump now. Biden should most definitely not.
[Reply to BlueSky post about the Democratic messaging machine shutting down after Biden’s victory, leaving a vacuum that Republicans filled.]Terry Gross interviewed some senior Dem strategist, 20 years ago or so, about the right wing echo chamber & their amazing message discipline.
Him: They circulate talking-points to EVERYONE each day and they all follow it. We have one too but no one does!
TG: What’s in it?
Him: …I haven’t read it.
[Wife posts a pretty picture of the sunset behind San Francisco.]Ooh, I want to be there!
Not because it’s pretty, but because you’re there taking the picture.
[Friend posts photos of slogans on church signs, I riff on a few by adding some words.]“A free thinker is Satan’s slave. A churchgoer is ours.”
“Faith sees God. Intellect does not. Faith sees that God was wrong to give us intellect.”

“Satan was the first to demand equal rights. Later, Moses did. So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”
[Reply to BlueSky post expressing surprise at the number of low-information voters.]Being mind-boggled about this is just our bubble at work.
We share habits that incline us to read broadly and critically, and the time and education to do it.

If we can’t imagine others without those privileges, we’re no better than our opponents, whom we complain care for no one but themselves.
[Resharing BlueSky post about conservative attempts to revoke the polio vaccine.]Preventing gun regulation. Forcing doctors to withhold life-saving care. Trashing air and water quality. Undermining food and drug safety. Discouraging masking and distancing in a pandemic. Encouraging wars. Denying climate disasters. Lionizing murderers.
In what ways are they not a death cult?
“Outside in” sounds like it ought to be the opposite of “inside out,” but it’s not.
Hear me out: Johnny Appleseed, but for news.In news deserts, Trump won in a landslide | Opinion
[Ken Jennings asks, “Do the Charlie Brown kids grow up and suddenly wake up one morning talking in the “wah-wah” trombone voice?”]I feel like I’ve spent my whole adulthood fighting the slide into wah-wah talk.
The old guard only ever gets older.
[Reply to BlueSky post: “Money makes cowards.”]“Good times make weak men.”
[Resharing some political analysis.]Read this excellent thread by an Illinois congressman.
[Reply to BlueSky post observing that we are due for one of those events every 80 years that reshape American society.]This is kind of a pleasing thought, in a Jeffersonian “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing” way.
If only it didn’t come along with so much human suffering and squandered opportunity.
[Reply to a BlueSky post quoting a Times headline: “Musk and Kennedy Jr. disagree on how to make America healthier – reflecting a broader dispute among experts.”]“Reflecting” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
You know you’re a programmer when you look at this and immediately see “pseudorandom.”
[Participating in a BlueSky trend.]“You will be visited by three spirits.”
The three spirits:
”[If we’re wrong] we’ve unilaterally disarmed ourselves in the face of a threat that could end up being more dangerous than any military invasion.”Geoengineering (Wrong 2)
Today’s mission: put as many smiles on the face of Andrea Glickstein as possible. She thinks it’s for her birthday but it’s actually for me, because I love her smiles.
[Wife shares photo from our game of the Disney edition of Villainous.]Andrea: “I want to be the Evil Queen.”Also Andrea: “I don’t want to hurt Snow White!!”
[Reply to a BlueSky post expressing heartbreak at being robbed of a competent and compassionate president (Kamala Harris).]How not to be too heartbroken: realize that many, many more people would have chosen Kamala if they hadn’t been convinced by a concerted global psy-ops program that anything is better than ever voting for a Democrat.
[Reply to BlueSky post about Trump’s frequent threats betraying a fear of ever actually showing strength.]“The more dangerous any two people were, the more carefully polite their social interactions tended to be. The loud, blustering ones were trying to get the other guy to back down. They wanted to stay out of a fight. The quiet ones were figuring out how to win it.”
– James S.A. Corey, Nemesis Games
[Reply to a BlueSky post complaining that NPR’s reporting on the Y2K bug dismisses all the work that went into making it a non-event.]The “You’re Wrong About” podcast did a great episode about this.
The Y2K Bug – You’re Wrong About

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