People Magazine:

Scott Adams has died at the age of 68. Adams first published Dilbert, a comic strip that satirized life in white-collar offices, in 1989. The comic strip became ubiquitous in the 1990s. Dilbert was pulled from wide circulation, however, after Adams degraded Black people in a 2023 rant.

Adams was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2025.

I was an early Dilbert reader. The strip was a mainstay at work. One of the first two books I bought on Amazon.com (in 1998) was The Dilbert Principle (a gift for my mom). I read God’s Debris at the suggestion of a friend and found it compelling if confusing. At some point I bought a Dilbert mug.

Yes, I was a fan.

This, despite having long recognized Adams as a bigot. He claimed he was denied promotions because he was white, while “less-qualified” Black people were promoted above him, despite admitting he was woefully unqualified for the job—and white people were getting promoted, just not him.

But sometime in 2015, 2016, Adams went completely ’round the bend, with his “Donald Trump is a master persuader” BS, his full-throated endorsement of Trump, and a marked shift toward verbalizing his “anti-woke” ideology on his podcast and Twitter. Oh, and Dilbert stopped being funny. It got worse after Trump won the election, and came to a head in 2023 when he declared—during Black History Month!—that Black people were a “hate group.” I found myself semi-regularly antagonizing him (and his defenders) on Twitter—right up until he blocked me.

I haven’t been a fan in a long time.

Living with cancer is awful, and prostate cancer is one of its devastating forms. And yes—fuck cancer. I take no great pleasure in Adams’ death from this terrible disease.

But I won’t be grieving for him.

See Also: The New York Times’s obituary.

When writing up the aforelinked joint statement, I kept getting proofreading errors that the “AI” in “Google’s Al technology” was incorrectly spelled.

Here it is, as seen on Google’s site:

You might already spot the problem.

Let’s change the font from that site’s Google Sans to something more distinctive, Apple Chancery:

Are you seeing it? Let me go one step further and use Copperplate, which uses small caps:

Yep, Apple is using “Google’s AL technology” instead of “Google’s AI technology.” I presume there’s a discount for buying a knockoff.

And don’t get me started on Google’s use of straight (“dumb”) quote marks.

Apple and Google, in a rare joint statement to CNBC and subsequently released by Google on its company news site and X/Twitter account:

Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google’s Gemini models and cloud technology. These models will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year.

After careful evaluation, Apple determined that Google’s Al technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and is excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for Apple users. Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute, while maintaining Apple’s industry-leading privacy standards.

I have many questions, none of which are answered by this brief statement:

• How much money changes hands (and in which direction)?
• Does “based on” mean Apple will augment Google Gemini technology for its needs? Is it then a unique model?
• Will Gemini replace current Apple models in existing features? Will Image Playground, for example, see improvements in quality and style?
• Will OpenAI’s ChatGPT be replaced by Gemini as the “I can’t answer that” escalation, or will Siri simply use Gemini to answer questions directly?

I’m sure further details from Apple will be forthcoming, but for now, Google is carrying the load here: there’s nothing from Apple directly.

It’s worth noting that, as brief as the statement was, it explicitly calls out that Apple Intelligence will “continue to” run locally and on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute—not on Google’s servers. That alleviates a lot of privacy concerns.

This is undoubtedly a sound decision for Apple, both technically and financially, but it must be at least a little disappointing to some on the inside that they’re abandoning—at least publicly—years of internal AI efforts.

It’s a stark and public admission that those efforts were woefully insufficient, and quite the shift from Apple’s usual “Not Invented Here” syndrome.

U.S. Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Edward Markey (D-Mass.), and Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), in a letter to Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai:

We write to ask that you enforce your app stores’ terms of service against X Corp’s (hereafter, “X”) X and Grok apps for their mass generation of nonconsensual sexualized images of women and children. X’s generation of these harmful and likely illegal depictions of women and children has shown complete disregard for your stores’ distribution terms. Apple and Google must remove these apps from the app stores until X’s policy violations are addressed.

It’s gratifying to see three Senators (all Democrats, it’s worth noting) pressing for action. That it’s only three Senators is pitiful.

Turning a blind eye to X’s egregious behavior would make a mockery of your moderation practices. Indeed, not taking action would undermine your claims in public and in court that your app stores offer a safer user experience than letting users download apps directly to their phones. This principle has been core to your advocacy against legislative reforms to increase app store competition and your defenses to claims that your app stores abuse their market power through their payment systems.

Both Apple and Google have also recently demonstrated the ability to move quickly to moderate apps from the app stores. For example, under explicit pressure, and perhaps threats, from the Department of Homeland Security, your companies quickly removed apps that allowed users to lawfully report immigration enforcement activities, like ICEBlock and Red Dot. Unlike Grok’s sickening content generation, these apps were not creating or hosting harmful or illegal content, and yet, based entirely on the Administration’s claims that they posed a risk to immigration enforcers, you removed them from your stores.

The continued availability of X and Grok from the App Store and Google Play leads me to believe Cook and Pichai are more afraid of incurring the wrath of Elon Musk—and, by extension, Donald Trump—than they are of knowingly, if unwillingly, distributing apps that create, host, and display “nonconsensual sexualized images of women and children.”

Keeping X and Grok after removing ICEBlock undermines Apple’s and Google’s assertions that they apply their guidelines without fear or favor, and weakens their argument that the app review process makes customers safer. If customers can download apps containing harmful and illegal content but can’t download apps that keep them safe, what’s the point of a singular app store or a “rigorous” review process? Either Apple and Google pull X and Grok from their stores or they admit the guidelines are merely convenient fabrications for exerting control.

Norbert Heger identifies why resizing windows in macOS 26 Tahoe is so frustratingly difficult: thanks to the comically large window corner radius, the area to grab is mostly off the edge of the window:

Living on this planet for quite a few decades, I have learned that it rarely works to grab things if you don’t actually touch them.

macOS Tahoe flips this expectation on its head.

The accompanying gif of him grabbing a plate captures the experience perfectly.

Heidi Li Feldman suggests one small “something” we can all do while we hope regulators ban Elon Musk’s CSAM-sharing X/Twitter:

If you have a moment, file a complaint against X with the Apple App Store.

This is a terrific idea. It signals support from Apple’s customers to take action against Musk’s creepy AI tools and offers a fig leaf to justify pulling the apps from the App Store.

Here’s how to file a report (it took me less than two minutes to file reports against both X and Grok. You can only report apps you’ve downloaded, but both are free and you don’t need to launch them):

1. Visit the Report a Problem page for X (Twitter).
2. Select Report offensive, illegal, or abusive content.
3. Select an appropriate option under Tell us more….
4. Provide the necessary details. Restraint is better than bombast. (Feldman’s example—“X is using its AI bot to generate child pornography on demand.”—is appropriately succinct and direct.)
5. Repeat for Grok.

Creating and displaying sexualized images of children and non-consenting adults in X and Grok is a clear violation of Apple’s guidelines, in particular:

1.1 Objectionable Content

Apps should not include content that is offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust, in exceptionally poor taste, or just plain creepy.

And:

1.2 User-Generated Content

To prevent abuse, apps with user-generated content or social networking services must include:

• A method for filtering objectionable material from being posted to the app […]

(It’s also a more valid application of 1.1 than using it to justify pulling ICEBlock.)

While I harbor few illusions that reporting the apps will lead to Apple actually yanking X or Grok, if enough people lodge complaints, perhaps Apple can muster a meaningful enough threat of removal to spook Musk into addressing the issue. There is precedent: in 2018, Apple pulled Tumblr and Telegram for hosting or sharing child pornography within their apps.

I’m not prepared to accept bets on this happening, though. Apple is quite reticent to threaten big apps with eviction, plus Musk is already suing them on frivolous antitrust grounds. Apple may see pulling his apps as needlessly handing him ammunition—though it may well blow up in his face if he’s obligated to argue that Apple must host apps that create and display child pornography.

Paris Marx on the aforelinked Grok shitshow:

Let’s be honest with ourselves: if a broadcaster or newspaper had started publishing thousands of non-consensual, sexually explicit images of women or — even worse — of children, politicians and regulators would be out for blood. It would be a front-page, ongoing scandal and the organization responsible would be quickly brought to heel because it would be so outrageous.

But when Elon Musk and his chatbot Grok do it, there’s somehow little more than crickets. Politicians are alarmed and say something needs to be done, but can’t quite say what that something is. Regulators say they’re investigating, as thousands more women and children are victimized while the richest man in the world continues treating the whole situation like a big game — or simulation.

Governments must ban X, argues Marx:

Regulators and politicians in some countries have been responding to what’s happening on X. The European Union, United Kingdom, France, and Australia are all investigating the matter, with some even saying what X is enabling is illegal. Indian officials gave X a 72-hour deadline to act on the illegal material, while some Brazilian politicians are calling for the platform to be banned once again. But let’s be real: the responses of regulators to a child porn-producing chatbot on the social media platform owned by the richest man in the world are not nearly strong or quick enough.

Creating a chatbot that victimizes thousands of women on command and generates child pornography should be a red line — and not one you can come back from. Elon Musk and anyone at X or xAI directly working on that functionality should be criminally held to account for the consequences of their actions. But many countries will not have jurisdiction for those crimes. Instead, they should take the obvious move of banning X before the harm it causes their citizens escalates even further.

One place Musk won’t have to worry about a ban is the United States—not while his pedophilia-adjacent buddy is in charge.

Jason Koebler, writing for 404 Media earlier this week (free account required):

Over the last week, users of X realized that they could use Grok to “put a bikini on her,” “take her clothes off,” and otherwise sexualize images that people uploaded to the site. This went roughly how you would expect: Users have been derobing celebrities, politicians, and random people—mostly women—for the last week. This has included underage girls, on a platform that has notoriously gutted its content moderation team and gotten rid of nearly all rules.

The only actions Musk has taken to put an end to this are to issue a weak stop, don’t “threat” and to limit Grok’s image generation and editing to paid subscribers—in other words, monetize the vile behavior. (His investors don’t seem to care, either, investing $20 billion—a ghastly sum of money—into xAI mere days after news of this abuse broke.)

Samantha Cole wrote an extensive follow-up piece for 404 Media (“Grok’s AI Sexual Abuse Didn’t Come Out of Nowhere”):

This is the culmination of years and years of rampant abuse on the platform. Reporting from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the organization platforms report to when they find instances of child sexual abuse material which then reports to the relevant authorities, shows that Twitter, and eventually X, has been one of the leading hosts of CSAM every year for the last seven years. In 2019, the platform reported 45,726 instances of abuse to NCMEC’s Cyber Tipline. In 2020, it was 65,062. In 2024, it was 686,176. These numbers should be considered with the caveat that platforms voluntarily report to NCMEC, and more reports can also mean stronger moderation systems that catch more CSAM when it appears. But the scale of the problem is still apparent. Jack Dorsey’s Twitter was a moderation clown show much of the time. But moderation on Elon Musk’s X, especially against abusive imagery, is a total failure.

Musk’s failure of moderation is what makes his threat (“Anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content”) not just meaningless, but disingenuous.

One brief observation from watching the New York Times frame-by-frame analysis of the murder of Renee Nicole Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross (as identified by the Star Tribune):

Ross already had his hand on his gun as Good’s car backed up to leave. Ross shoots Good three times: once through the windshield at an angle, then he reaches through the open driver-side window and fires twice more at Good from point-blank range.

The Star Tribune reports:

“he acted according to his training,” Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, told the Minnesota Star Tribune in an email, noting that this specific agent was selected for ICE’s Special Response Team, is an expert marksman and “has been serving his country his entire life.”

Identifying the man who shot a woman in the head at point-blank range as “an expert marksman” is especially callous and sadistic.

On June 17, Ross was participating in an arrest of Roberto Carlos Munoz-Guatemala, a Mexican citizen, in Bloomington last year. Munoz-Guatemala had previously been convicted of fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct and had been put on a detainer by immigration officials. Munoz-Guatemala ignored the agents’ commands, including to fully roll down his car window, so Ross broke open his rear window and reached inside to unlock the door.

Ross was dragged by the car and required “20 stitches for a deep cut in his right arm and another 13 stitches in his left hand.” JD Vance suggests that justifies the killing:

“That very ICE officer nearly had his life ended … six months ago,” Vance said, referring to the earlier car-dragging incident.

“You think maybe he’s a little bit sensitive about somebody ramming him?”

If he’s still “sensitive” about being “rammed,” he (1) shouldn’t be standing in front of vehicles, and (2) is unfit for duty and shouldn’t have been in the field.

After killing Good, Ross re-holsters his gun as he watches the vehicle spin out of control and crash, then slowly walks toward it. Ross appears calm the entire time—including as he casually asks his colleagues to “call 9–1–1”.

These are not the actions of a man who panicked or feared for his life. They’re the actions of a man who made a deliberate choice to fire his weapon—three times—into a moving vehicle.

Arrest and charge Ross now.

John Gruber, linking to the New York Times’ frame-by-frame analysis of the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis by a mask-wearing ICE agent:

This ICE agent murdered Renee Good, in broad daylight, in front of many witnesses and multiple cameras. Trust the evidence of your eyes and ears.

As a general rule I try to refrain from both watching videos that show people being killed (I find them akin to snuff films) and commenting on breaking news of this nature (there are often too many unknown unknowns).

I made an exception and watched the video, and Gruber is right about two things: this is a murder in broad daylight, and the woman who recorded it, Caitlin Callenson, is an unflinching, steel-spined hero.

Apple:

Today, Apple and Chase announced that Chase will become the new issuer of Apple Card, with an expected transition in approximately 24 months.

The Wall Street Journal broke the news (Apple News+) just ahead of the official announcement. Goldman Sachs (the exiting issuer) released its own statement; Chase simply copied Apple’s (and somehow made it uglier). I wonder which of them leaked the deal.

Goldman Sachs has been looking to exit the consumer credit card business for more than two years. The Apple Card has been especially challenging because it has “a high exposure to subprime borrowers and what has been a higher-than-industry-average delinquency rate,” reports the Journal. Chase purchased the portfolio for a $1 billion discount; the Journal notes that discounts “are rare and are reserved for the most challenged cases.”

Proving the difficulty of the business are these two nuggets from the Chase and Goldman Sachs press releases:

Goldman Sachs:

The transaction is expected to result in a $0.46 earnings per share increase to Goldman Sachs’ fourth quarter 2025 results. This reflects a release of $2.48 billion of loan loss reserves reflected in provision for credit losses […]

Chase:

[…] the purchase of the portfolio is estimated to bring over $20 billion of card balances to the Chase platform. […] JPMorganChase expects to recognize a $2.2 billion provision for credit losses in 4Q25 related to the forward purchase commitment […]

Chase’s $2.2 billion reserve on a $20 billion portfolio reflects an approximately 11% expected lifetime loss rate. That’s materially higher than the current ~4% loss rates across all bank credit cards—implying a borrower mix for Apple Card that skews somewhat below “prime” when compared to, say, Chase Sapphire—though we’re not exactly in NINJA-loan territory here.

I can understand why Goldman Sachs wanted out: an 11% expected loss rate—$1 out of every $9 in balances not being collected—is exorbitant for a company more comfortable serving wealthy clients. Chase is treating it as an acceptable risk for their broader credit card portfolio—and they’re operationally and institutionally more capable of supporting the “average” consumer.

Apple also released a set of Frequently Asked Questions (at the distinctive “learn.applecard.apple” URL), the answers to most of which are variations of “nothing changes” or “stay tuned.”

I’ve been a Chase credit card customer for well over a decade; my most used card is with them. I’ve never had any issues, so this transition should be a non-event. Not addressed in the announcement or FAQ is whether Apple Card will (eventually) show up alongside other Chase-issued cards on their (surprisingly good) website (and app) or remain locked away behind the functionally stunted Apple Card site and Apple Wallet. For now, I’ll assume that Apple will continue to maintain full operational control while Chase acts only as the issuer, meaning it won’t integrate the card with its site, which would be a shame.

It was a roller coaster day at RevMed, where my wife works. The Wall Street Journal (Apple News+), in a report by Jonathan D. Rockoff, Lauren Thomas, and Cara Lombardo at 2:48 pm EST today:

AbbVie is in advanced talks to buy cancer-drug biotech Revolution Medicines, according to people familiar with the matter.

Revolution Medicines has a market value of around $16 billion. It couldn’t be learned how much AbbVie is offering, but including a typical deal premium, Revolution could be valued at around $20 billion or more.
 
A deal could come together soon, granted the talks don’t hit any last-minute snags, the people said.

The news sent Revolution Medicine’s (RVMD) stock soaring as much as 30%, briefly touching $105, while AbbVie’s (ABBV) stock saw a comparatively modest 5% surge from its open.

Ninety minutes later, Puyaan Singh at Reuters reported there’s no such deal in the works:

AbbVie on Wednesday denied it was in talks to buy Revolution Medicines […]

The company “is not in discussions with Revolution Medicines,” AbbVie said in an emailed statement to Reuters.

Revolution Medicines dropped nearly 14% after hours, and AbbVie lost most of its gains, too.

Three possibilities occur to me:

1. The WSJ completely bungled their facts.
2. Someone successfully leveraged WSJ for stock manipulation.
3. The leak caused one party to walk (“is not in discussions”).

Whatever the reason, someone undoubtedly made oodles of money, and the Wall Street Journal is wiping egg from its face.

Update: The WSJ has now revised their headline, from “AbbVie Near Deal for Revolution Medicines” to “Revolution Medicines Draws Takeover Interest,” with a subhead “AbbVie said to be among suitors.” The paper also congratulated itself on the rise of RevMed (“Its shares were trading up around 30% after the Journal’s report”).

Previously.

Donald Trump’s Ministry of Truth Fiction Department rewrites January 6 history:

The Democrats masterfully reversed reality after January 6, branding peaceful patriotic protesters as “insurrectionists” and framing the event as a violent coup attempt orchestrated by Trump—despite no evidence of armed rebellion or intent to overthrow the government.

And:

Following the President’s speech, the massive crowd peacefully marches down Constitution Avenue to the Capitol to protest the certification of the fraudulent election. The march is orderly and spirited, with flags, signs, and chants supporting President Trump.

Someone should demand Trump and his lackeys watch the videos and explain how beating police officers is “peaceful” and smashing windows is “spirited.”

Placing Nancy Pelosi’s “I take responsibility” quote front-and-center is especially galling if you actually watch what she said instead of relying on Trump’s mischaracterization.

George Orwell, 1984:

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

We’re solidly into doublethink territory.

NPR compiled an expansive, meticulously maintained visual record that reconstructs the January 6 attack and its aftermath:

In the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, American political leaders almost universally condemned the riot as an act of domestic terrorism that threatened democracy. Now, President Trump calls Jan. 6 a “day of love” and the rioters “great patriots.” And since he issued mass pardons to the rioters, his administration has been trying to rewrite history.

NPR has tracked every Jan. 6 prosecution in a public database, and, drawing on thousands of hours of footage and years of reporting, created a front-line account of the riot. The evidence vividly shows the planning for “revolution” and the brutality of violence on a day that continues to shape American politics.

Seeing all of the threads chronicled in an interconnected timeline underscores the level of coordination across disparate groups, even if it wasn’t collectively “planned.” Utterly damning. A historic act of journalism.

John Pavlovitz (on Substack, alas):

Five years ago, I would have bet my house that Republican voters’ patriotism, faith convictions, and simple humanity would have surfaced, and they would reject this violent lawlessness once and for all.

And as that January night turned to morning and as the scale and severity of what we’d witnessed and how close we all came to losing our Democracy became clear, I remember thinking to myself, “There is no way they will double down on this or on him now, or ever again.”

I was spectacularly wrong.

I remember watching, slack-jawed and fearful for our republic, as a violent mob breached the Capitol live on TV, raised the Confederate flag in that building for the first time in our history, and called for the assassination of lawmakers, all while the president of the United States reveled in the chaos and did nothing to end it.

I wrote then:

This is an attack on the American government, instigated and encouraged by a sitting president, in an illegal attempt to keep him in power.

This is no longer a theoretical coup attempt. This is an actual coup attempt. Whether it succeeds or not, it must be reported as such.

I also wrote:

This day will be read about in history books in every country in the world. This will be the legacy of Donald J. Trump.

I was not confident Trump would walk out of the White House voluntarily on January 20. And even if he did, I was deeply concerned that he would still have the attention of millions of people willing to commit armed insurrection in his name.

But once Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were certified, and the “peaceful” transfer of power did occur, and Trump did leave the building (if not exactly “willingly”), I became confident that Trump was done politically and that the inexplicable allure of Trumpism had finally dissipated.

How naïve.

I anticipated “one-term president who instigated an insurrection in a failed attempt to maintain power” as the one-line brief of his presidential biography and opening sentence to his eventual obituary.

Instead it will be “two-time president and convicted felon, who, despite instigating an insurrection, convinced 77 million voters to elect him for a second term, during which he constructed deportation camps; destroyed the East Wing; terrorized Americans with his “ICE” police force; illegally deported immigrants; abducted the president of Venezuela; enriched himself, his family, and his cronies via grift and patronage…”

Pavlovitz, again:

January 6th should have been America’s second chance at life; a moment for us to speak unequivocally that no one is above the law and no individual is greater than the whole.

That it became instead, a place for our fellow Americans to once again declare their undying allegiance to this man, and to an ugly, lumbering, violent march toward an ever-deepening bottom is one of the absolute most tragic realities of my lifetime.

Now, the engineer of this delayed but now completed insurrection has no limitations on his sociopathy.

Donald Trump’s biography may well end with “…and dismantled 250 years of American democracy.”

Ten years on, and still funny. From the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2016 Shakespeare Live! celebration for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.

(Sadly, in the U.S. I can find only paid options to watch the full two-hour show: Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video (affiliate links). It’s available on BBC iPlayer for viewers within the U.K. Everyone else would need to jump through several VPN and registration hoops and face the wrath of the BBC TV license authority.)

Nikita Prokopov, after reading the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines from 1992 (“Don’t … overload the user with complex icons”):

Fast forward to 2025. Apple releases macOS Tahoe. Main attraction? Adding unpleasant, distracting, illegible, messy, cluttered, confusing, frustrating icons (their words, not mine!) to every menu item: It’s bad. But why exactly is it bad? Let’s delve into it!

Prokopov catalogues in tremendous detail the myriad ways macOS 26 Tahoe’s use of icons is inconsistent, confusing, and downright maddening. For example, Prokopov identifies twelve different icons for a “New” menu item.

It’s a brutal and well-deserved takedown.

My take is that the icon inconsistency is clearly iOS-inspired, where (virtually) all menu items have an associated icon, and seemingly stems from an apparent remand that all macOS menu items should also have icons for “consistency,” as if someone decided that consistency across operating systems was more important than decades of Macintosh user interface design—despite the current HIG explicitly stating “Not all menu items need an icon.” (It’s easy! Just pick one of the thousands of icons we’ve already designed! I can imagine that someone saying.)

I’m still running macOS Sequoia 15.5 on my main MacBook Air which—with few exceptions—doesn’t use icons in menus, and I’ve never once felt I was missing out.

(I have no plans to “upgrade” this system to macOS 26 Tahoe unless it becomes untenable. I use Tahoe on a test system. It’s… painful.)

I hold out hope that someone at Apple sees this icon transgression and is humble enough to fix it.

Update: Unrelated, but the snowfall effect on Prokopov’s article made it difficult to read and caused my iPhone 17 Pro to heat up to the point of being hard to hold. Disabling the snowfall also swapped an otherwise readable blue background with a garish yellow one. Every creative has their unmurdered darlings.

Dan Rice at The Hard Times:

In a stunning instance of miscommunication between departments, ICE agents have deported Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro back to Venezuela just hours after he was abducted by the DEA.

Remember, in this timeline, “satire” is just something that hasn’t happened yet.

See Also: “Trump Is Boasting About an Alleged Land Strike in Venezuela — Here’s Why He Is Still a Pedophile”:

A regime change in Venezuela will not erase Trump’s relationship with sex trafficker Jefferey Epstein

It’s an open secret that Trump’s real goal here is to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, a known dictator who just so happens to be sitting on some significant oil and rare earth mineral reserves. It is, however, also an open secret that Donald Trump bonded with Jefferey Epstein over their shared love of coercing sex from women under the age of 18. Trump himself has called this a “Wonderful secret.”

Jeffrey, but still: The Hard Times goes hard.

Meg Kinnard and Michelle L. Price, writing for AP News:

Months of covert planning led to the brazen operation overnight, when President Donald Trump gave an order authorizing Maduro’s capture. The U.S. plunged the South American country’s capital into darkness, infiltrated Maduro’s home and whisked him to the United States, where the Trump administration planned to put him on trial.

Months of planning.

Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at Trump’s news conference that U.S. forces had rehearsed their maneuvers for months, learning everything about Maduro — where he was at certain hours as well as details of his pets and the clothes he wore. […]

Rehearsed for months.

Trump said on Fox that U.S. forces had practiced their extraction on a replica building.

“They actually built a house which was identical to the one they went into with all the same, all that steel all over the place,” Trump said.

Built a house.

I don’t know how long it takes to build a replica of a heavily fortified presidential compound, but I’ll guess it’s not a short period of time.

I’m left wondering exactly when this operation “Absolute Resolve” was initially broached, and whether the attacks on alleged “drug-carrying” boats off the coast of Venezuela, which started in September and have killed at least 115 people, were mere pretext and distraction.

Rebecca Solnit:

1:

They are saying it baldly: this is an oil grab.[…]

How Venezuela stole its own oil on its own territory is something I would love JD Vance to explain in a war crimes tribunal, but the short version is imperialism plus the habit of Republican administrations of regarding the fossil fuel industry as inseparable from government and making its interests the top priority.

3:

It is also an attack on international law. It undermines any US opposition to China seizing Taiwan, which appears to be a possibility this year, and normalizes the invasion of Ukraine by the Putin regime. […] When Trump is finished, this country will have immense repair work to do to reestablish the rule of law at home and rebuild international alliances. If we return to normal. If we remain a nation.

4:

This is serious and important and we must pay attention to it. But we must not lose sight of what the Trump Administration would love us to lose sight of: a wildly unpopular president doing his utmost to harm the people of this country and enrich himself, his family, and his cronies while in rapid mental and physical decline and in an ongoing panic over what the Epstein files could tell us about him.

Solnit punctuates her post with social media screenshots from politicians and others illustrating the depths of this regime’s illegal, unauthorized, and dangerous actions.

Isaac Chotiner for The New Yorker (soft paywall; Apple News+):

On Saturday morning, President Donald Trump announced that the United States military, working with American law-enforcement officials, had carried out a strike in Venezuela, capturing the country’s President, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores. Maduro was indicted in a federal court in New York for his role in what the Administration claims is a narco-terrorism conspiracy. At a press conference later on Saturday, Trump said, “We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.” He also said that he was not concerned about “boots on the ground,” referring to an American military presence.

I spoke by phone on Saturday morning with Oona Hathaway, a professor at Yale Law School and the director of its Center for Global Legal Challenges. She is also the president-elect of the American Society of International Law. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed whether Maduro can legally be tried in American courts, the long history of U.S. meddling in Latin America, and what makes Trump’s decision so uniquely dangerous.

Chotiner’s first question:

What is the legal basis, such as it is, for this action?

Unfortunately, I don’t think there is a legal basis for what we’re seeing in Venezuela. There are certainly legal arguments that the Administration is going to make, but all the arguments that I’ve heard so far don’t hold water. None of them really justify what the President seems to have ordered to take place in Venezuela.

The United States is a rogue state controlled by a dictator and his apparatchiks, with a feckless Congress doing absolutely zilch to stop them.

Reporters Annie Linskey, Josh Dawsey and Meridith McGraw of The Wall Street Journal in a knives-out look at Donald Trump’s health (paywalled; Apple News+):

Trump, 79, the oldest man to assume the presidency, is showing signs of aging in public and private, according to people close to him.

The piece is filled with several face-palming examples of Trump’s poor health regime (he “uses aspirin for ‘cardiac prevention,’” and takes 325 milligrams a day—which he’s been doing for 25 years—because he wants “nice, thin blood pouring through” his heart), but this bit made me chuckle:

His physical signs of aging are becoming more evident to some of his closest advisers. His skin is so delicate that Pam Bondi, now his attorney general, caused his hand to bleed when she nicked him with her ring while giving him a high-five at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

This paragraph was under the subhead “Delicate skin.” So much for metaphors.

Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle, at Duke University School of Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain:

On January 1, 2026, thousands of copyrighted works from 1930 enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1925. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. The literary highlights range from William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage and the first four Nancy Drew novels.

I had no idea the Nancy Drew books I enjoyed in the 1970s and ’80s were first written in the 1930s. (The Hardy Boys books started in 1927!)

Other interesting public domain works: The Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers, Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (the book, not the fantastic movie), and Betty Boop.

Via Ellen Wexler at Smithsonian magazine, who summarizes and adds helpful context to a few of the books, movies, and music that entered the public domain this year, including Betty Boop’s first appearance in the 1930 short, Dizzy Dishes, which I’d never seen and is a mind-bending trip.

Over lunch, my friend Matt reminded me of this article from Michael Green (“How a Broken Benchmark Quietly Broke America”) on the origins and impact of the poverty line (part 1 of a three-part series):

This week, while trying to understand why the American middle class feels poorer each year despite healthy GDP growth and low unemployment, I came across a sentence buried in a research paper:

“The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.”

I read it again. Three times the minimum food budget.

I felt sick.

The formula for the poverty line, Green learned, was developed by Mollie Orshansky, an economist at the Social Security Administration, after observing that groceries accounted for one third of a family’s income:

Orshansky was careful about what she was measuring. In her January 1965 article, she presented the poverty thresholds as a measure of income inadequacy, not income adequacy—“if it is not possible to state unequivocally ‘how much is enough,’ it should be possible to assert with confidence how much, on average, is too little.”

She was drawing a floor. A line below which families were clearly in crisis.

The poverty line formula was “a measure of ‘too little,’” below which “you were in genuine crisis,” and above which “you had a fighting chance,” writes Green.

The cost of supporting a household has shifted dramatically since 1963. Childcare “didn’t really exist as a market,” notes Green, and can consume 20 to 40 percent of a household budget, while housing and healthcare costs have exploded (ranging from 35 to 45 percent and 15 to 20 percent, respectively). Food now accounts for just 5 to 7 percent of expenses, not a third.

If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share—but update the food share to reflect today’s reality, the multiplier is no longer three.

It becomes sixteen.

Which means if you measured income inadequacy today the way Orshansky measured it in 1963, the threshold for a family of four wouldn’t be $31,200.

It would be somewhere between $130,000 and $150,000.

And remember: Orshansky was only trying to define “too little.” She was identifying crisis, not sufficiency. If the crisis threshold—the floor below which families cannot function—is honestly updated to current spending patterns, it lands at $140,000.

What does that tell you about the $31,200 line we still use?

It tells you we are measuring starvation.

Green pursues this argument through “The Valley of Death”:

Once I established that $136,500 is the real break-even point, I ran the numbers on what happens to a family climbing the ladder toward that number.

What I found explains the “vibes” of the economy better than any CPI print.

Our entire safety net is designed to catch people at the very bottom, but it sets a trap for anyone trying to climb out. As income rises from $40,000 to $100,000, benefits disappear faster than wages increase.

He spotlights the societal support that exists for families making $35,000 (“The ‘Official’ Poor”), which erode as those families increase their earnings.

At $45,000 (“The Healthcare Trap”), a $10K raise loses them access to Medicaid, which then costs them $10,567 in premiums and deductibles.

At $65,000 (“The Childcare Trap”), childcare subsidies are eliminated; the $20K raise costs the family $28,000.

When you run the net-income numbers, a family earning $100,000 is effectively in a worse monthly financial position than a family earning $40,000.

At $40,000, you are drowning, but the state gives you a life vest. At $100,000, you are drowning, but the state says you are a “high earner” and ties an anchor to your ankle called “Market Price.”

Green also uses the Covid lockdowns as a “proof of concept” that illustrates how the “working poor” benefited from eliminating several of these expenses for a time:

In April 2020, the US personal savings rate hit a historic 33%. Economists attributed this to stimulus checks. But the math tells a different story.

During lockdown, the “Valley of Death” was temporarily filled. Childcare ($32k): Suspended. Kids were home. Commuting ($15k): Suspended. Work Lunches/Clothes ($5k): Suspended.

For a median family, the “Cost of Participation” in the economy is roughly $50,000 a year. When the economy stopped, that tax was repealed. Families earning $80,000 suddenly felt rich—not because they earned more, but because the leak in the bucket was plugged. For many, income actually rose thanks to the $600/week unemployment boost. But even for those whose income stayed flat, they felt rich because many costs were avoided.

I found Green’s arguments compelling: it is ridiculous that a formula from 1963 remains the basis for determining poverty levels six decades later. It’s likewise unjustifiable that a salary increase can actually cost you money as subsidies are phased out.

Unsurprisingly, Green received a lot of pushback—in particular, for the $140,000 number itself, which some argue is artificially high—which he dutifully addresses in Part 2 of his series (“The Door Has Opened”).

While I, too, initially found the headline number exorbitant, and the math didn’t always math, it quickly became clear the actual number wasn’t the point: it was the significant delta between the putative poverty line and the actual “cost of participating, the cost of working”—the reality that “the threshold where a family can afford housing, healthcare, childcare, and transportation without relying on means-tested benefits” is well above $31,200. The $140,000 number may be high, but it’s directionally, if not mathematically, accurate.

(Part 2’s section on “The Wealth Lie” and the “phase transition […] from Class to Caste” is an especially withering assault on the notion of upward mobility via wealth inheritance. “You aren’t inheriting a fortune. You are inheriting a hospice bill,” writes Green.)

In Part 3 (“The Pursuit of Happiness”), Green starts to address solutions. He introduces the “Rule of 65,” which he calls “a simple, aggressive strategy” that shifts taxes from workers and onto “idle capital” by raising taxes on corporations, cutting FICA rates while increasing the FICA cap, and eliminating benefit cliffs by expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit.

(While Part 1 by itself is provocative (deliberately or not, I can’t be sure), Parts 2 and 3 frame and contextualize Green’s argument. I recommend treating them as one long piece.)

Surprisingly, Green is not a liberalist calling for massive wealth redistribution, but a small-c conservative (“just one that is tired of the lies”) who once managed the personal capital of Peter Thiel and founded a hedge fund seeded by George Soros. His recommendations are rather tame compared to what some are seeking, and don’t neatly align to liberal/conservative orthodoxy.

I can’t honestly say I follow all of his arguments (and his conservatism sometimes peeks through; for example, he deems “government-directed expenditures (housing vouchers, SSI, Nutrition, Unemployment Insurance)” to be “even worse” than lowering taxes for the rich), but it was an immensely eye-opening read.

Paul Waldman on Donald Trump’s “frenzy of construction and renaming” (the illegally renamed Kennedy Center, a proposed “Arc de Trump,” the East Wing ballroom, “Trump Class” battleships, TrumpRx, Trump Accounts, Trump Gold Cards…):

Some of these are programs and websites, but the ones that are most important to the president — the ballroom, the ships, the signage on buildings, the arch — are the ones that have physical form.

What’s going on here? Narcissism, insecurity, self-aggrandizement, the mania of the cult leader — sure. But there’s something else at work.

Trump is haunted by mortality.

That’s the most succinct explanation I’ve seen of Trump’s desperate attempts to avoid becoming a forgotten footnote in history.

I wholeheartedly endorse Waldman’s recommendations for addressing Trump’s narcissism:

In the first hours and days of the next president’s term, there must be a concerted effort to utterly expunge the name “Donald Trump” from every federal building, outpost, sign, website, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse, and doghouse, except where necessary for historical accuracy.

And not just the name, but every vulgar trace of him: Chisel off the letters, take down the photos, melt down the stupid coins, tear out his patio and replant the Rose Garden, strip all the chintzy gold appliques from the walls of the Oval Office. Maybe even demolish the ballroom, but at the very least remodel it so it doesn’t look so much like an obscene mashup of the Winter Palace and Saddam Hussein’s bathroom, then rename it for someone he hates. The Obama Ballroom has a nice ring to it.

I’ll bet all the money in my pockets against all the money in your pockets that Donald Trump would sooner destroy the world than see “his” ballroom named after President Obama.

Ryan MacTheodore Schleifer and Heather Knight, reporting for The New York Times (gift link):

Billionaires including Peter Thiel, the tech venture capitalist, and Larry Page, a co-founder of Google, are considering cutting or reducing their ties to California by the end of the year because of a proposed ballot measure that could tax the state’s wealthiest residents, according to five people familiar with their thinking. […]

The moves are being driven by a potential California ballot measure from the health care union, Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, the people said. The proposal calls for California residents worth more than $1 billion to be taxed the equivalent of 5 percent of their assets.

Don’t let the door hit ya where the good lord split ya.

These are the same sorts of people who promised to flee New York City if Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral election—there’s been no such exodus.

The proposed tax would cost Page, worth an estimated $258 billion, more than $12 billion; Thiel, worth about $27.5 billion, could pay more than $1.2 billion.

How will they ever survive?

The measure faces opposition from Silicon Valley investors and others, including Gov. Gavin Newsom. At The New York Times DealBook conference this month, Mr. Newsom said a wealth tax was not pragmatic. The Democrat, who has been close with people like Mr. Page, is raising money for a committee to oppose the measure.

Can Page and Thiel take Newsom with them when they leave?

“The inevitable outcome will be an exodus of the state’s most talented entrepreneurs who can and will choose to build their companies in less regressive states,” Chamath Palihapitiya, a tech investor, said on social media this week.

The only meaningful outcome will be a handful of incredibly wealthy individuals avoiding taxes by claiming domicile in poor states so they can continue extracting wealth from the system.

There’s better than even odds that if you’re reading this site, you already know MKBHD, but his latest video, in which he explores the infinitesimally small interior of Apple’s M5 chipset at “human scale,” was especially impressive. It’s a collaboration with Epic Spaceman, who regularly creates this style of video for his own channel, and his companion video is even more remarkable. Both do a tremendous job contextualizing just how astonishingly tiny these processors have shrunk.

(Also, in a sign I’ve watched too much 30 Rock, I can’t help pronouncing his handle Epic Spa-che-man.)

I played several Infocom text-based games in high school (Zork being the most famous example) and loved the Invisiclues system: a booklet with hints to the Infocom puzzles, printed in invisible ink that you swiped with a special marker to reveal the answers. I recently discovered they’re available online for all of Infocom’s games, with obscured answers that you must click to reveal.

What made Invisiclues especially fun and clever was that the booklet wouldn’t immediately give you a direct answer. Instead, it would often start with a vague solution—for example, in Zork, the first answer to “How do I open the egg without damaging it?” is “You don’t”, hinting at another who could—with the answers increasing in specificity before finally revealing the explicit solution.

(The booklets also included fake or unhelpful clues, which I found terribly amusing. In Zork, the answer to “Is the gas of any use?” is “It’s great for blowing up dim-witted adventurers who wander into a coal mine with an open flame.” Having been one of those dim-witted adventurers, I chortled.)

This is a completely niche site for People of a Certain Age and Geekiness, and I’ve already spent an inordinate amount of time exploring it.

Bilge Ebiri, in Vulture, with a terrific oral history of How the Grinch Stole Christmas (via New York magazine in Apple News+):

It is the strangest movie. When Ron Howard and Jim Carrey teamed up to make a live-action feature-film adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s beloved children’s book How the Grinch Stole Christmas, some might have expected a straightforwardly heartwarming family picture, but the resulting 2000 film was nothing of the sort.

I really enjoyed reading this history of this movie, which has become a holiday classic—but I’ve never seen it (I can only take Carrey’s manic energy in small amounts). It intrigued me enough to finally consider watching the darn film, a quarter-century later. The history also left me deeply impressed by Carrey’s commitment to his over-the-top performance.

When this story came out a couple of weeks ago, the anecdote making the rounds was about Carrey’s panic attacks during filming and needing an intervention to help him survive the full-body makeup process:

Carrey: Richard Marcinko was a gentleman that trained CIA officers and special-ops people how to endure torture. He gave me a litany of things that I could do when I began to spiral. Like punch myself in the leg as hard as I can. Have a friend that I trust and punch him in the arm. Eat everything in sight. Changing patterns in the room. If there’s a TV on when you start to spiral, turn it off and turn the radio on. Smoke cigarettes as much as possible. There are pictures of me as the Grinch sitting in a director’s chair with a long cigarette holder. I had to have the holder, because the yak hair would catch on fire if it got too close.

Later on I found out that the gentleman that trained me to endure the Grinch also founded SEAL Team Six. But what really helped me through the makeup process, which they eventually pulled down to about three hours, was the Bee Gees. I listened through the makeup process to the entire Bee Gees catalogue. Their music is so joyful. I’ve never met Barry Gibb, but I want to thank him.

Quite the fun Christmas Day read.

I was (and remain) a huge fan of Alton Brown’s Good Eats (and its various reboots and related books), so I’m thrilled to see he’s back with a new YouTube series, Alton Brown Cooks Food (episode 1, The Big Bird, revisits his classic roast turkey recipe). He’s five episodes in, and it’s everything I love about AB and Good Eats—from cameras-in-ovens to detailed-yet-digestible food concepts to his sarcastic sense of humor (which very much aligns with my own)—just with less over-the-top stagecraft. Even if I’ll never make a standing rib roast or gluten-free sugar cookies, I’m happy he’s returned to my screen.

Rob Carlson:

Interesting (but entirely anecdotal) note since I started responding with human trafficking assistance resources to every incoming sha zhu pan (“pig butchering”) text message -- they have stopped completely. I believe I got added to some exclusion list the criminals pass around. So I can endorse this strategy on several levels now.

Pig butchering “is a type of online scam where the victim is encouraged to make increasing financial contributions over a long period,” often initiated via a text message or phone call with a seemingly random query—“Are you free tomorrow?” or “I found your number while checking my contacts. Did I save the wrong number, or have we chatted before? 😅”—which I got today.

These “misdirected” text messages and phone calls rely on our human tendency to be helpful (“sorry, wrong number”). Once you’ve responded, the scammer will strike up a conversation, which will eventually—perhaps weeks or months later—lead to a request to send or make money.

I usually block-and-report these messages and calls as spam, but Carlson takes a different approach, recognizing that the scammers are themselves often victims. From that aforelinked Wikipedia entry:

Perpetrators are typically victims of a fraud factory, where they are lured to travel internationally under false pretenses, trafficked to another location, and forced to commit the fraud by organised crime gangs.

In an effort to combat this, Carlson responds with this message:

Sometimes people who send messages like this aren’t doing it by choice, and are being forced or trafficked into it. If that’s what’s happening, you don’t have to tell me details but please know you can get help confidentially and for free. You can message @BeFree (233733) in the U.S. or visit humantraffickinghotline.org for local numbers in other countries. They can connect you with safety, shelter, and legal help without involving the police unless you want that.

The potential dual benefits of reducing scam texts and addressing one of the underlying causes have me reconsidering my block-as-spam approach—though I remain wary of engaging.

Others in the thread have noted that Carlson’s options are U.S.-centric, and they’ve suggested other global resources, including:

• Thailand (via badsamurai)
• Australia (via Stib)
• Norway (via Lemmus)

I expect several more resources will be added to the thread.

If you’re curious to learn more about pig butchering—and how to protect yourself from the scam—read these three articles:

• Stay Safe Online: What Is Pig Butchering And How To Spot The Scam (2024)
• investopedia: Pig Butchering Scams: What They Are and The Red Flags You Must Spot Early (2025)
• ProPublica: What’s a Pig Butchering Scam? Here’s How to Avoid Falling Victim to One (2022)

I’ll end with this advice from Investopedia:

If you have already invested money with someone you suspect may be a scammer, stop all communication with them immediately and contact your bank or financial institution to report the incident and discuss your options for recovering your funds. You should also report the scam to the appropriate authorities, such as the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).

What to Do If You’ve Been Scammed

1. If you suspect you’ve fallen victim to a pig butchering scam, you should immediately take the following steps:

2. Stop all contact with the scammer immediately.

3. Notify your bank or broker and block any further payments to the scammer.

4. Report the crime to local law enforcement and file a complaint with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).

5. Gather all documentation related to the scam (text messages, screenshots, financial records, etc.) to assist investigators.

6. Consider seeking counseling to help you cope with the emotional impact of the financial loss and the other effects of being scammed.