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George Lakoff and Gil Duran at FrameLab offer “Advice for defeating the authoritarian threat.” All are great; three stood out for me:
Avoid brain rot and lies. Social media is overrun with clickbait traps that profit from outrage and misdirection. Block these and seek out legitimate information sources grounded in truth and reality. Subscribe to trusted media outlets so journalism survives – we’ll need it more than ever. Always do a basic fact-check before sharing memes, texts, or stories. Never spread false stories or conspiracy theories, even if you wish they were true, even if you think they’re funny. Once we can no longer discern fact from falsehood (or we no longer care), the authoritarians win. Don’t be on the wrong side of the information war!
I’ve seen a lot of very compelling social media posts that I very much wanted to be true and to share. My natural skepticism would kick in and lead me to do some digging, only to find it was misleading, a conspiracy, or an outright hoax. I’m always happy I don’t accidentally spread misinformation, but it’s getting harder, and we all need to be more vigilant.
Don’t help Trump. Some of Trump's opponents are obsessed with focusing on him personally; thus, they unwittingly amplify and boost his propaganda. By focusing solely on Trump – his ridiculous statements, mannerisms, and antics – Trump's opponents make him a larger-than-life figure. They also reinforce his messages by constantly repeating them and thus marketing them. In short, they help Trump. We can’t completely ignore his quirks and lies, but the constant boosting of his every utterance appears to have worked in his favor so far. See: 2024 election results.
I’ve been guilty of dunking on The Other Side by sharing news or memes that make them look doltish or disorganized, but I recognized I was part of their propaganda machine. For the coming Mump Regime, I’m defaulting to a new policy: Media oxygen deprivation. I won’t ignore them, but I won’t blindly boost them either. Let their ideas suffocate in the right-wing echo chambers while the rest of us focus on democratic efforts to govern.
Demand accountability. Authoritarians thrive on impunity. It’s critical to hold leaders, corporations, and institutions accountable. Insist on accountability. Write letters, sign petitions, and participate in boycotts when necessary. Demand transparency and fairness at every level. Corruption and injustice wither under the light of scrutiny.
You’ll be forgiven for wondering if this could possibly still be true today. Trump, the GOP, the Supreme Court, state legislatures—all have repeatedly escaped accountability. Many simply ask themselves what the consequences of their actions will be, or, as Dave Rahardja succinctly put it, “Or Else What.” For most, the answer is “nothing.” This must change.
The rest of Lakoff and Duran’s advice is just as compelling, cogent, and actionable.
I especially enjoy slow mornings and time for fun and play. I plan to enjoy more long walks, home cooked meals, and good books.
I hope 2025 allows for more real luxuries for you and your loved ones.
Happy New Year.
(Original author unknown. @breadandcircuses via @gogoronzilla.)
Jay Kuo pens a thorough (and thoroughly entertaining) summary of last week’s in-fighting:
Right wing populism has always had an uneasy relationship with the tech bro billionaire class, which is often responsible for who gets good jobs and who doesn’t in the U.S.
Over Christmas, that uneasy tension erupted into an online bloodbath as the face-eating leopards pounced. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are the co-chairs of Trump’s newly designated Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), came out publicly in favor of H-1B visas for highly skilled, foreign workers.
Musk said the quiet part out loud, arguing that the number of "super talented engineers" who were also "super motivated" was far too low, implying that Americans lacked both talent and motivation.
Hmmm. Folks on the right didn’t like that so much.
I cackled throughout.
Broadly unpopular then, Carter went on to become not just the longest-lived president but also to have one of the most distinguished post-presidential careers. He was awarded the Nobel peace prize for “decades of untiring effort” for human rights and peacemaking. His humanitarian work was conducted under the Atlanta-based Carter Center, which he founded in the early 1980s, with Rosalynn.
Jimmy Carter was the first president I was aware of, thanks to my grandmother, who thought him a kind man. I knew him best for his commitment to Habitat for Humanity. In the handful of instances I’ve seen him speak, he always seemed to have a twinkle in his eye. It certainly seemed to me like he enjoyed being a former president far more than being president. And it positively tickled me when he declared his intention to live long enough to vote for Kamala Harris—and then did so.
President Biden has ordered U.S. flags to be flown at half-staff for the next 30 days and declared January 9, 2025 a National Day of Mourning. I’m grateful President Carter will be honored in a state funeral led by a president respectful of both the office and the man.
Elsewhere:
iA, the company behind iA Writer, my preferred tool for writing on this site, has a new award:
We’re always interested in finding and celebrating good writers and presenters. That’s why we’re launching writing and presenting awards. Show us what you created using our tools.
The prize is their simply stunning iA Notebook.
(Aside: I love notebooks, and I’ve recently returned to an old love of fountain pens. I’ve eyed the iA Notebook but hesitated to buy it because 1) My handwriting is atrocious, and B) it’s $73… $98 with shipping. The nearly hundred dollars is an easy justification for someone who hand writes more than I do, but I’m confidant I’d find all sorts of excuses to use it if I won (or finally break down and buy one for myself. End aside.))
I submitted one of my articles—Happy Birthday, America—to give myself at least a chance to win this stunning notebook (though I have no illusions about those chances!).
I selected this one because it’s my most popular piece, and was a lot of fun to write.
I’m a huge fan of iA Writer; in my submission email, I wrote:
Every word (of this article and of the site) was written in iA Writer and published directly to Ghost via its integration.
Being able to write across multiple devices and have them in sync via iCloud is fantastic. Many a time I’ve drafted an article on my iPhone, polished it on my iPad, and published it from my MacBook—with nary a missed comma.
Because iA Writer is markdown-flavored plaintext, I can also roundtrip between it and several other tools, like Drafts, BBEdit, and git. It’s become the center of my writing workflow.
Update: The deadline for submissions has been extended to January 1, 2025. Get your writing and presentations in!
A welcome yet deeply unsatisfying coda[1] to an appalling story I linked to back in August, from Brian Lee at New York Law Journal:
A New York judge who's serving a suspension with pay for threatening to shoot Black teens, and had urged police to do so, for crashing a high school graduation party her family attended, will no longer appeal for her reinstatement, the Law Journal has learned.
State Supreme Court Justice Erin Gall of Oneida County said through a motion filed by her attorney that she’s no longer opposing the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct’s recommendation for the state’s top court to remove her.
The Commission, Lee writes,
[…] had unanimously voted to recommend Gall's removal for a “racially offensive, profane, prolonged public diatribe” [….]
Instead of appealing, she’s resigning:
“I have resigned from my position and have no intention to remain on the bench even if I were to succeed before the Court of Appeals,” the motion read.
I presume she’s resigning before she’s fired for cause—she would be prevented from ever being a judge again if she lost her appeal.
My unsupported-by-any-facts guess is that by avoiding a hearing she expects to lose, she preserves some standing with the Courts, and perhaps allows for a very lucrative pension she might otherwise be ineligible for if the appeal failed. There might even be a job offer that’s contingent on her being merely “a retired judge” rather than “a fired judge.”
(Is it too much to suggest such an offer would be with the incoming administration?)
Her official reason, though, is fear for her family:
In her motion she said that her “story has [been] carried by not only local but national news and social media. The attention incited numerous physical threats upon my family, requiring 24-hour law enforcement protection. In particular, my two sons received numerous death threats. The fear has been immeasurable and terrifying. I do not believe that I can move forward with arguing this appeal for fear that my family will be put in danger once again.”
Also:
Gall asked the Court of Appeals to give her a lifeline by rendering "no specific findings other than removal to help lessen any potential harm to my family due to social media and national news exposure.”
While I don’t doubt the threats upon her and her family, I do find it rich that she’s effectively pleading for mercy so she and her family aren’t ravaged on Bluesky and YouTube.
I found this bit especially exasperating:
“I certainly do not think it fair to characterize my reactions as racially motivated and to stigmatize me with that finding based on the facts in the case,” she added.
I’ve said it many times: Racists aren’t concerned about being racist, just being called racist.
“Unsatisfying” because her behavior that night calls into question her impartiality, and, as I wrote in my original piece, “any cases which ever came before her involving police or Black people should probably be reviewed, if not tossed outright.” That this doesn’t seem to be happening is, yes, galling. ↩︎
Ted Gioia, in his The Honest Broker newsletter (where he has written several times about the Spotify ‘ghost artist’ kerfuffle), adds some valuable context to the aforelinked Harper’s piece from Liz Pelly:
In early 2022, I started noticing something strange in Spotify’s jazz playlists.
I listen to jazz every day, and pay close attention to new releases. But these Spotify playlists were filled with artists I’d never heard of before.
Who were they? Where did they come from? Did they even exist? […]
Many of these artists live in Sweden—where Spotify has its headquarters. According to one source, a huge amount of streaming music originates from just 20 people, who operate under 500 different names.
Some of them were generating supersized numbers. An obscure Swedish jazz musician got more plays than most of the tracks on Jon Batiste’s We Are—which had just won the Grammy for Album of the Year (not just the best jazz album, but the best album in any genre).
How was that even possible?
How indeed.
They called it payola in the 1950s. The public learned that radio deejays picked songs for airplay based on cash kickbacks, not musical merit.
Music fans got angry and demanded action. In 1959, both the US Senate and House launched investigations. Famous deejay Alan Freed got fired from WABC after refusing to sign a statement claiming that he had never taken bribes.
Transactions nowadays are handled more delicately—and seemingly in full compliance with the laws. Nobody gives Spotify execs an envelope filled with cash.
But this is better than payola[….]
By Gioia’s estimate, Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek sold over $348 million worth of Spotify stock in 2024, and concludes:
[…] nobody in the history of music has made more money than the CEO of Spotify.
(He includes Taylor Swift in that “nobody” list, but I’m skeptical of that.)
He continues:
I need to complain about the stupid major record labels who have empowered and supported Spotify during its long history. At some junctures, they have even been shareholders.
I’ve warned repeatedly that this is a huge mistake. Spotify is their adversary, not their partner. The longer they avoid admitting this to themselves, the worse things will get.
He calls on Congress to investigate streaming companies, as they did with the payola scheme, and ends with this call to action:
And let me express a futile wish that the major record labels will find a spine. They need to create an alternative—even if it requires an antitrust exemption from Congress (much like major league sports).
Our single best hope is a cooperative streaming platform owned by labels and musicians. Let’s reclaim music from the technocrats. They have not proven themselves worthy of our trust.
I’m not sure calling on the record labels to be part of the solution is the right answer; “futile” might be a massive understatement. While it might be in their best interest to have a streaming solution they (along with musicians) control, I doubt such a service will change who makes the money. In the end, it’s the artists and musicians who may need to build a streaming service they control, and which has their interests at heart.
Deeply researched investigative reporting by Liz Pelly for her forthcoming book “Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist,” excerpted in the January edition of Harper’s Magazine:
Spotify, the rumor had it, was filling its most popular playlists with stock music attributed to pseudonymous musicians—variously called ghost or fake artists—presumably in an effort to reduce its royalty payouts. Some even speculated that Spotify might be making the tracks itself. At a time when playlists created by the company were becoming crucial sources of revenue for independent artists and labels, this was a troubling allegation.
The challenge for Spotify was how its listeners use the service:
According to a source close to the company, Spotify’s own internal research showed that many users were not coming to the platform to listen to specific artists or albums; they just needed something to serve as a soundtrack for their days, like a study playlist or maybe a dinner soundtrack. In the lean-back listening environment that streaming had helped champion, listeners often weren’t even aware of what song or artist they were hearing. As a result, the thinking seemed to be: Why pay full-price royalties if users were only half listening? It was likely from this reasoning that the Perfect Fit Content program was created.
What a truly absurd justification: half-royalties for half-listening? Can you imagine Spotify being on the receiving end of such inane logic? “I‘ll pay you half your subscription fee because I’m only half listening.” You’d be laughed out of the room, and rightly so, too.
At least Spotify employees recognize this justification for what it is:
In a Slack channel dedicated to discussing the ethics of streaming, Spotify’s own employees debated the fairness of the PFC program. “I wonder how much these plays ‘steal’ from actual ’normal’ artists,” one employee asked.
These “normal artists” are creating works that generate millions of listens—and thus millions in revenue—for Spotify and the “fake” labels, but not the artists themselves:
The musician who made ambient tracks for one of the PFC partner companies told me about power imbalances he experienced on the job. “There was a fee paid up front,” he explained to me. “It was like, ‘We’ll give you a couple hundred bucks. You don’t own the master. We’ll give you a percentage of publishing.’ And it was basically pitched to me that I could do as many of these tracks as I wanted.” In the end, he recorded only a handful of tracks for the company, released under different aliases, and made a couple thousand dollars. The money seemed pretty good at first, since each track took only a few hours. But as a couple of the tracks took off on Spotify, one garnering millions upon millions of streams, he started to see how unfair the deal was in the long term: the tracks were generating far more revenue for Spotify and the ghost label than he would ever see, because he owned no part of the master and none of the publishing rights. “I’m selling my intellectual property for essentially peanuts,” he said.
It feels like Spotify is taking advantage of struggling musicians who don’t fully understand their role in this equation, that they, the musicians, are what Spotify’s listeners are paying for. Imagine if this artist had been able to publish their music themselves, while getting the same level of visibility this PFC program offers. They would make much more money. But this, of course, would require Spotify to pay way more in royalties, which isn’t nearly as profitable for them.
And you can’t have a discussion about the worth of creators today without AI entering the studio:
This treatment of music as nothing but background sounds—as interchangeable tracks of generic, vibe-tagged playlist fodder—is at the heart of how music has been devalued in the streaming era. It is in the financial interest of streaming services to discourage a critical audio culture among users, to continue eroding connections between artists and listeners, so as to more easily slip discounted stock music through the cracks, improving their profit margins in the process. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which the continued fraying of these connections erodes the role of the artist altogether, laying the groundwork for users to accept music made using generative-AI software.
And:
Spotify, for its part, has been open about its willingness to allow AI music on the platform. During a 2023 conference call, Daniel Ek noted that the boom in AI-generated content could be “great culturally” and allow Spotify to “grow engagement and revenue.”
My translation: “We’d make so much more money if it weren’t for those pesky musicians.”
Spotify plays David in its battle against Apple App Store rules, but when it comes to musicians, it’s Spotify who’s the Goliath.
Techdirt and Diegetic Games launch a Kickstarter for a new card game:
Have you ever been on social media and thought “I bet I could run this site better than the people in charge”? Well, now’s your chance to test your skills. We’ve created One Billion Users: a fast, fun card game where you’re in charge of your own social network. It's for 2-4 players and lasts about 30 minutes.
In One Billion Users, players compete to build the most successful social network. Gain users and attract influencers to build your site while playing cards to slow down your rivals and overcome obstacles. But be careful about which communities you attract — the toxicity they bring with them could hurt your platform!
This is my kind of game, where the goal is as much to get ahead as it is to screw with the other players. This can be especially fun with a close-knit group of friends.
While the game is new, the mechanics are anything but:
One Billion Users is inspired by the public domain game “Touring” which William Janson Roche released in 1906. Touring is a car racing card game, in which you try to go further while putting obstacles on other players. It is considered to be the first “take that!” style card game, which has been imitated and adapted many times since. The most famous such adaptation was 1954’s Mille Bornes, which was so popular that it briefly outsold Monopoly. Mille Bornes is almost an exact replica of Touring with just a few small changes.
We’ve taken the basic mechanics of Touring and adapted it to a favorite topic of ours: social media. Beyond retheming the game, we’ve added new mechanics including: attracting and stealing influencers, balancing user toxicity, and random events (like tech bubbles) that affect all of the players.
I love that a turn-of-the-(last)-century game is the inspiration for an extremely-21st-century game.
As of 1:30 PDT, the campaign had about ten hours to go and were just a few thousand dollars shy of their $50,000 goal. I backed on both the concept, and the strength of an endorsement of a friend. Let’s push them over the top!
Update: Immediately after posting this I checked the campaign again, and it hit its goal. I’m excited to play!
See also: The Verge review.
(Via @zkiraly.)
Acorn 8 has been released!
This is a major update of Acorn, and is currently on a time-limited sale for $19.99. It's still a one time purchase to use as long as you'd like, and as usual, the full release notes are available.
I’ve been using Acorn since—I think—2007 (my earliest receipt is for an Acorn 3 upgrade in 2012), and I’ve been a fan of Flying Meat (Gus & Kirstin Mueller) for even longer (I was an early VoodooPad user, which came out in 2003).
Acorn is by far my most-used graphics tool. Almost every image on JAG’s Workshop makes its way through Acorn before landing here, even if it’s just a resize. I also used it extensively for title cards and social media posts when I was producing the (on hiatus) Lettuce Wrap podcast.
While the AI Subject Selection, Live Text, and other features in Acorn 8 are sure to be the ones to grab headlines, the feature I’m most excited about is Data Merge:
Acorn 8 has the ability to read in a CSV file and it'll dynamically swap in the row values and replace text or bitmap graphics depending on what's in the data file. It's like mail merge, but for images. This is pretty awesome if you have a bunch of templated images you want to create.
As usual for Flying Meat, the documentation for the feature is clear and easy to follow. Good documentation is a sign a developer cares deeply about their customers.
One of my favorite existing features of Acorn is the Export (Web & Other) tool, where I can quickly compare output quality and sizes, trim image edges, and remove metadata. It’s a feature that seems straightforward—perhaps even boring—but greatly simplifies my workflow. It’s been further improved in Acorn 8, adding saved configurations and more export options (including the next generation JPEG XL format).
I love indie developers and spent most of my career supporting them (including Gus/Flying Meat!). Acorn 8.0 was an easy insta-upgrade.
Graham Fraser, writing about the BBC, on BBC:
The BBC has complained to Apple after the tech giant's new iPhone feature generated a false headline about a high-profile murder in the United States.
Apple Intelligence, launched in the UK earlier this week, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to summarize and group together notifications.
Apple Intelligence is new to the U.K, but those of us in the U.S. have been ridiculing it for a month now. As John McClane said, “Welcome to the party, pal!”
This week, the AI-powered summary falsely made it appear BBC News had published an article claiming Luigi Mangione, the man arrested following the murder of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself. He has not.
Headlines are an editorial decision, and represent the voice of the publication. A poor summary can be embarrassing. A misleading one—as this was—can sully the publication.
"BBC News is the most trusted news media in the world," the BBC spokesperson added.
"It is essential to us that our audiences can trust any information or journalism published in our name and that includes notifications."
Apple can’t afford this bad press if Apple Intelligence is going to be taken seriously and drive hardware sales.
If Apple can’t address this quickly, they may have another egg freckles situation on their hands.[1]
To summarize: The handwriting recognition on the Apple Newton would fail, often in spectacular ways. Garry Trudeau “mocked the Newton in a weeklong arc of his comic strip Doonesbury, portraying it as a costly toy that served the same function as a cheap notepad, and using its accuracy problems to humorous effect. In one panel, Michael Doonesbury's Newton misreads the words "Catching on?" as "Egg Freckles", a phrase that became widely repeated as symbolic of the Newton's problems.” ↩︎
Dave Rahardja on Mastodon:
John Lennon’s 1974 music video of Mind Games was remastered to 4K, featuring Lennon meeting fans around Central Park and New York City. The original was shot on film, so a ton of details were recovered. I love how vivid this footage is. It really transports you to a bygone time.
I missed this video when it was released in August; my thanks to Dave for sharing it.
It captures a very ’70s vibe (color palette, clothing, hairstyles) I remember when I first visited New York, and which still permeated the city when I moved there in 1981. I can practically taste those Marino’s Real Italian Ices Lennon was checking out around minute 1:15.
I’m not sure this type of video—a massive star wandering around a city, meeting fans who were respectful even in their obvious excitement—could be made today. At least, not without a massive security apparatus.
An aside: I especially appreciated seeing Lennon goofing around in the Central Park Bandshell, a place where I also goofed around as a youth actor with the New York Parks’ Shakespeare Company—and where Lennon’s death six years later was mourned by over two hundred thousand people.
If, after reading my last entry, you remain unconvinced that we are already in dangerous territory, here’s Erin Reed’s Post-Election 2024 Anti-Trans Risk Assessment Map that shows the states where it is safe—or extremely dangerous—to be LGBTQ+.
Twenty-six states have anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. Florida and Texas, unsurprisingly, are the two worst, earning a “Do Not Travel” rating.
Whether you are yourself trans, have trans friends or family, or are simply a decent human being, it’s impossible to ignore the existential threat the new administration poses. Not just because of the awful laws they will certainly look to enact in the future, or because of the protective laws they simply won’t enforce. It’s because of the permission it will give—and already has given via its 2016 incarnation—to states, municipalities, and individuals to do their worst. All politics is local, and the incoming administration doesn’t need to enact a single damn law to make life for the LGBTQ+ community even more dangerous than it already is[1].
Sixteen states, incuding California, Hawaii, and Minnesota, recognize the threat and have enacted strong protections, including shield laws that ensure access to transgender healthcare. Many LGBTQ+ people are moving into those states to cloak themselves in a mantel of security. I’m grateful these states are willing to take a stand. I hope it’s sufficient.
This is also true for abortion rights, gender and racial equality, global warming, international incidents, financial markets, etc. “Doing nothing” is as much a path to destruction as any specific law that may get passed. ↩︎
My partner and I first broached the possibility that we might need to flee the country last summer. After election day, we began that preparation in earnest.
There’s a lot we don’t know. The incoming administration has threatened to do a lot of terrible things to transgender people; withholding medication; legislative erasure; forced detransition; mass incarceration; extermination. Many of these things, I’d want to stay and fight through. Others would make daily life impossible or unbearable.
She and her partner went through several scenarios that might push them to fight, or force them to flee, and she’s shared a template to help others think through their decision points.
She also shared a long list of existing anti-trans legislation and rhetoric from politicians. It’s terrifying to realize we’re already deep into dangerous territory; it’s not theoretical, or, as Haste titles that section, “These Things Are Already Happening. You are not overreacting.”
I’ve been wondering recently when the people who survived the Holocaust—because they fled Germany and elsewhere—decided it was time to leave. How bad did it get before they packed up their belongings and left their homes, family, friends, and country behind?
Right now, five weeks after the election, and five weeks before the next administration takes control, it feels both too soon and the absolutely right time to start thinking about an exit plan if you or a loved one are vulnerable.
At some point it may be too late. We might only recognize that moment in retrospect.
(Via @inthehands@hachyderm.io.)
An all-too-brief origin story about one of my favorite drinks, sorrel, from culinary historian Ramin Ganeshram in Imbibe:
Our folklore tells us that the first sorrel maker was Anansi, the trickster spider, a character from the Akan storytelling tradition. Anansi traveled from Ghana to the Caribbean with enslaved people, and was adapted based on local traditions. Anansi, the story goes, steals a stalk of roselle hibiscus, flings it into a pot of boiling water with sugar and spices (including a native Caribbean addition, allspice), and tries to pass it off as wine. When villagers don’t believe him, Anansi cries, “It is so real!” What they hear is “It’s sorrel,” and so the drink and the name were born.
The truth of the name is a darker story. As violence stripped enslaved people of their cultural identities and languages, the drink called bissap in Senegal, zobo in Nigeria, and zobolo in Ghana became known as “sorrel,” a pidgin form of roselle.
Ganeshram also drops this nugget:
In the last 12 years, bartenders have come to know an elegant form of this heritage Caribbean drink in Sorel, the liqueur made by Jackie Summers (whose mother's parents emigrated from Barbados) and his company, Jack From Brooklyn. Made with roselle flowers from North Africa, Sorel is the most awarded liqueur in American history, with more than 200 accolades in the gold or better category. It's a smooth, complex brew that subtly and consistently marries the flavors of traditional sorrel without the home-brewed inconsistencies that can make it too sweet or sour, or too heavy on certain spices.
I’ve enjoyed Sorel for years and had no idea it was so well-appreciated by others.
Yesterday I wrote:
Everyone’s hair is on fire because a president pardoned his son. Unprecedented? Sure.
Early this morning, I came across an Esquire article from Charles P. Pierce in Apple News+, headlined:
A President Shouldn’t Pardon His Son? Hello, Anybody Remember Neil Bush?
The deck was as straightforward:
Nobody defines Poppy Bush’s presidency by the fact that he pardoned his progeny. The moral: Shut the fck up about Hunter Biden, please.
The article included the following paragraph (emphasis added):
But the luckiest thing about this lucky American businessman is that his father and brother were both presidents of the United States, and that his father exercised his unlimited constitutional power of clemency to pardon The Lucky American Businessman for all that S&L business way back when. The president’s name was George H.W. Bush. The Lucky American Businessman was his son, Neil, whose brother, George, later became president of the United States himself.
I bookmarked it, prepared to post an update to my “unprecedented” comment, but in tracking down the direct web link, I instead got a “Sorry, this story isn’t available in Apple News” error.
Hm. The article was still available in Apple News+ when visited it directly, but both the headline and the deck were now changed. It now read:
Hunter Biden Isn’t the First Presidential Son Caught Up in Controversy. Anybody Remember Neil Bush?
Nobody defines Poppy Bush’s presidency by his son’s struggles or the pardons he issued on his way out of the White House. The moral: Shut the fck up about Hunter Biden, please.
It includes an Editor’s Note:
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated. An earlier version stated incorrectly that George H. W. Bush gave a presidential pardon to his son, Neil Bush. Esquire regrets the error.
The paragraph I quoted also removed the reference to a pardon:
But the luckiest thing about this lucky American businessman is that his father and brother were both presidents of the United States. The president’s name was George H.W. Bush. The Lucky American Businessman was his son, Neil, whose brother, George, later became president of the United States himself.
On the Esquire Politics site simply pulled the article, giving it a title “This Column Is No Longer Available,” with the content of article itself also replaced by an Editor’s Note.
It appears Pierce, the article’s author, got caught spreading misinformation, possibly originating on Threads (archive). The Threads post itself now has a Community note linking to a fact-check.
I wanted to believe that H.W. Bush had pardoned his son—and no one has thought about it since—because I also believe Hunter Biden’s pardon would have absolutely zero impact on President Biden’s legacy.
I’m not sure if Pierce wrote the story based on the misinformation, or added the “pardon” bits to an existing story.
Either way, it’s a reminder of the importance of double-checking what you read, especially when it validates your own viewpoint.
President Joe Biden, in a direct and unapologetic statement:
Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter. From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.
When the news broke Sunday evening that President Biden pardoned his son, Hunter, my first thought was good for him. I also knew I’d awake to a string of pearl clutching.
Sure enough, the deluge of denunciations came fast and furious. Almost every story led with the “reversal” of President Biden’s “previous pledges” to not pardon his son, with the “hypocrisy” of his decision “sparking backlash.” Republicans called him a “liar”, Democrats were “disappointed.”
I can’t get into President Biden’s head, but I think that once Trump won, a pardon was a fait accompli. I’m sure the prosecutors knew that, too, at least at some level. There was no way he’d let his son twist in the wind ahead of a vindictive incoming president who nominated Matt Gaetz/Pam Bondi as Attorney General and Kash Patel to lead the FBI. He may have “broken” his promise, but I believe that promise was made under very different circumstances, before the American public elected a criminal. At this point, I think there’s a bit of “fuck it” happening, and I’m OK with that.
I’m only surprised that he did it now, and not at 11:59 a.m. on January 20, 2025, as a massive, Dark Brandon middle finger to the incoming administration.
If Donald Trump’s children were facing jail time, is there any doubt in your mind that he would immediately use his one incontrovertible power as president and pardon them? Heck, I suspect he might do it preemptively as soon as he’s sworn in, just in case.
May I remind you that Donald Trump pardoned his daughter’s father-in-law four years ago, and then, last week, nominated him as ambassador to France?
Beyond that, Trump has a litany of self-serving pardons. I don’t recall the Right raising a ruckus about it four years ago.
Everyone’s hair is on fire because a president pardoned his son. Unprecedented? Sure. But only because the president’s son was prosecuted for a crime few other people would be charged with. As Biden notes in his statement:
Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form.
From that previously linked list of Trump pardons and commutations:
The rapper Kodak Black […] was granted a commutation. In 2019, he was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for lying on background paperwork while attempting to buy guns.
Sounds familiar. Except:
[Black] admitted to lying on background check forms while buying multiple firearms […].
Prosecutors said two of the guns were later found by the police at crime scenes, including one — with Black’s fingerprints and a live round in the chamber — that had been used to fire at a “rival rap artist.” […]
Another weapon was discovered in the trunk of a car as the rapper and his team attempted to cross the Canadian border into upstate New York in April. Black was charged with unlawful possession of marijuana and criminal possession of a firearm.
The underlying crimes are superficially similar. If Trump can commute a stranger’s sentence in this situation, why shouldn’t President Biden pardon his son for a less serious version of the same basic crime?
Unsurprisingly, the New York Times has the pearl-clutchiest of takes. Under the hed “Broad Pardon for Hunter Biden Troubles Experts,” writer Kenneth P. Vogel suggests the pardon
[…] is raising awkward historical comparisons and sharp questions about the use of presidential clemency.
Vogel then quotes one of those experts:
“It is extraordinarily hazardous to use the pardon power in a case where the person is an intimate of the president,” said Aziz Z. Huq, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.
It’s unclear why the good professor believes this, providing no evidence to support his belief, only that:
[…] President Biden’s pardon of his son “really does strike at the rule of law.”
Except it doesn’t. The president has the absolute authority to issue pardons, which Vogel himself immediately notes:
Presidents have unchecked authority to issue pardons, which wipe out convictions, and commutations, which reduce prison sentences.
We may not like how some have used that authority, but it is very much within “the rule of law.”
I’m not big on bothsidesism, but in a world where the president-elect is a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist, who was granted “presidential immunity” by a stolen Supreme Court, and who successfully ran out the clock on his own prosecutions, I’m perfectly comfortable with President Biden exercising his power as a president, and as a father.
The hypocrisy of the Right and everyone else handwringing over this is staggeringly vomitous. Their side has—and will do—much, much worse.
Now, I’d like for President Biden to take it a million steps farther, and offer preemptive pardons and commutations to everyone incarcerated for minor drug offenses, sitting in jails pending bail, and all the people the president-elect has suggested will be targeted by his incoming “Justice” Department. To quote Keith Olbermann:
Literally offer a pardon to anybody Trump might go after for prosecuting him, criticizing him, covering him, or looking at him funny. I want a 1-800-PARDONME hotline. I want 10 million pardons.
After all, if the President’s decision to pardon his son will, says the reliably execrable Jonathan Turley,
be a decision that lives in infamy in presidential politics.
he might as well go all the way. He’s got nothing to lose.
I’m visiting my mom, sitting on my bed with my Vision Pro, legs stretched out in front of me while scrolling through immersive images, and marveling at how good 2D-converted-to-3D photos look. The room has a door to the left and a blank wall to the right.
I’m flipping through images, and suddenly I’m in the bedroom at my home, 2,500 miles away. There was the bedroom door to the left, slightly ajar. The bathroom door to my right, light shining through. Air purifier on the floor. For the briefest of moments, nothing felt odd. I was on my bed at home. I’ve seen this view through my Vision Pro dozens of times.
Then my brain flipped out as it realized I wasn’t looking at reality. The bathroom door wasn’t there. The glowing blue light of the air purifier wasn’t there.
The photo aligned perfectly with the room I’m in: a door where a door was; the bathroom door to the right filling in the blank wall, and the bed, stretched out before me.
I stared at the photo for several seconds trying to figure out what was actually real and what wasn’t. Even though I knew where I was and what I was looking at, I had to lift the Vision Pro to confirm my surroundings.
It was surreal.
The Vision Pro has several issues. It’s expensive. It’s heavy. It stresses my eyes. There aren’t enough compelling apps and content yet.
But goodness, it absolutely nails that tangible sense of being there.
It’s not without some mild reservation that I note the 18th anniversary of the release of the Nintendo Wii. One of my favorite gaming systems is now an adult.
The Wii hit the shelves on November 19, 2006, and quickly became the biggest holiday gift. Waiting lists—and the lines of people wanting to buy—stretched long. People who were lucky enough to reach the front of those lines would sometimes buy two or three and sell them at absurd markups.
In honor of Wii’s birthday, let me tell you the story of how my good friend Torrey Walker (aka THW) made my Christmas that year.
I first wrote about this as it happened in my now-defunct personal blog. Here are those entries (lightly edited for length and clarity).
It started just a few weeks after the release, just as the frenzy was reaching fever pitch.…
December 05, 2006: Don’t Buy A Wii
I must implore you: Don’t buy a Nintendo Wii.
As you’ve no doubt heard, both Sony and Nintendo have new gaming systems this gift-giving holiday season, Sony with its sequentially named Playstation 3, and Nintendo with its oddly named Wii.
When I younger, and more dexterous, I loved playing video games. I owned a Playstation and SuperNES; I now own a PS2 and Nintendo GameCube. But I don’t play anywhere near as much as I used to, so the thought of buying a new video gaming system didn’t catch my fancy. Especially one that costs $600 (PS3) or was a minor advance graphically (Wii).
My friend Torrey, though, is an avid gamer, to the point where he stood in line to buy a Wii. Me being the curious sort, and him being the generous type, he brought his Wii over to share with [my then-girlfriend] Ying and my friend Elliot.
We played with Wii for several hours, and it was an absolute blast; from the clean and minimalist Apple-like design, to the Wii-mote (the wireless Wii remote controller), to the surprising physicality of the Wii Sports games.
Ah, the games. Wii comes bundled with a sports pack: Bowling, Tennis, Boxing, Golf and Baseball. You use the Wii-motes as you would use the appropriate sports implement: with Bowling, you pull your arm back and roll it forward as if you were releasing a bowling ball; with Tennis, you swing as if you had a racquet; with Boxing, you hold them in your fists and punch; etc.
Of course, these are video games, and you would expect that you’d be sitting on your couch, waving these Wii-motes around and jamming buttons, but no: we found ourselves getting into the physical motions of playing the games. We’d swing the Wii-mote like we really had a tennis racquet in our hands, even though a sharp wrist flick would be enough. Or we’d deliver huge roundhouse punches in Boxing, even though fast jabs would get the job done.
Both Elliot and Ying were especially interesting to watch. Elliot really got into Tennis; he was leaping back and forth across the floor, reaching for the balls as they whizzed past him. Ying took Boxing to heart, punching and jabbing like her life depended on it, and working up a sweat.
In fact, that would be the hallmark of the Wii afternoon: by the end of the day, all four of us had gotten some amount of physical activity we would not have gotten if we were playing any other video game. That’s right, a workout. Elliot, Ying and I all “boxed” for 15 or 20 minutes, and by the end of it, not only had we started sweating, we actually felt pain in our shoulders and arms!
From a video game!
By the time Torrey was re-boxing the Wii, I was already considering buying a new video game system. I concluded my initial review:
So again, I must beg of you: don’t buy a Wii. If this post tempted you, resist. If you find yourself in a Toys ‘R’ Us or Wal-Mart, and you see that gleaming white rectangle sitting on the shelf, you don’t want it.
But do me a favor will you? Hold on to it and give me a call, OK?
Two weeks later, things escalated.
December 17, 2006: A Wii Bit of Madness
It’s 5:30 on a Sunday morning, and I’m about to go stand in line for a Nintendo Wii. What am I, crazy?
Indeed, I was clearly suffering from Wii-thdrawal after playing with the system but not having one of my own, so I figured I had to at least try to get a Wii. It didn’t go as I’d hoped.
[Ying and I] have returned from our Wii excursion, and other than memories of long lines and cold people, we are empty-handed. We visited ten locations (which includes repeat visits to one), and each store had a line longer than we could have imagined.
Waking up at 5:30 am was, it turns out, an amateur move.
We happened to be [at Westgate Mall Target] last night about 8pm, and three families had already lined up (one at 6pm) for an 8am store opening. When we returned this morning, about 7am, the line was over 100 people, for a store claiming 100 units.
Had we decided to stand in line at 8pm the night earlier, we would have come home with a Wii. Ah, Wii-grets.
Ying is a little disappointed by the lack of Wii; she’s second-guessing her decisions to wake up at 5:30, to go to certain stores in a certain order, etc. For me, it was more of an experiment. It was interesting to see which stores had longer lines, and how many people were willing to brave the cold (37 degrees, by my car’s gauge) for a game system.
I’m willing to wait until the excitement subsides a bit.
Yep, I’d pretty much Wii-signed myself to not owning a Wii for weeks, possibly months, and I was OK with that.
Then Torrey Did A Thing.
December 20, 2006: THW comes through, Wii is in the hizz-ouse!
In 1984, my mom woke me up early Christmas morning. Sitting next to my bed was the unopened box of an Apple //c computer and monitor. My uncle owned one of those, and I’d spent time at his house hacking with it. He’d once promised he’d bring it over to my house so I could have more time with it. Even in my sleepy state, when I saw the box, my initial shot of excitement was quickly replaced with cold logic: “What’s my uncle’s computer doing here?”
I was told nope, it’s not your uncle’s, it’s yours, and it’s your Christmas gift.
I believe the ceiling still has an imprint of my head, and the floor a dent from my jaw [from] the extremely unexpected present.
Today, THW sent me an email.In today? What time can I stop by to say hi? I’m leaving... tomorrow and won’t be back until just before New Years. /thw
Stop on by, I told him. I figured we’d BS for a few minutes, catch up on what’s been going on the last couple of days, chat about plans for the holiday break we’re about to start. You know, typical friend stuff before you don’t see each other for two weeks or so.
In he walks. We chat about two minutes before he steps back outside my office, and I hear some rustling of plastic. He steps back in and hands me a white box with “Wii” written on it in huge letters.
Let me go through my thought process here.
On seeing it: Fucker! You got a me a gift and put it in a Wii box? That’s cold.
On holding it: It’s heavy.... Oh! You’re loaning me your Wii for the week you’ll be away. That’s fucking sweet. What a good friend.
I thanked him for loaning it to me, and he says, nope, that’s yours. That’s your Christmas gift.
I couldn’t quite get my mind around it. You’re giving me your Wii?
“No”, he says (silently adding “you idiot”, I imagine), “it’s yours.”
Through a series of circumstances, he had an extra one. When he read my entry about waking up at 5:30 to stand in line, and coming back empty-handed, he made his decision: as his Christmas gift to me, he would sell me his extra Wii. I guess he decided that getting up that early to buy one was a worthy endeavor, and instead of making beaucoup bucks scalping it on eBay (as he rightly could), he decided to sell it to me.
Wow.
Last Saturday, when Ying and I had decided to wake up early the next day, I called Elliot, and offered him the chance to buy a Wii, should we find ourselves lucky enough to find two. He declined, but was touched that I would give up a potential financial benefit for him. I didn’t quite understand it at the time. He’s my friend, and of course if I’m buying a Wii I’ll pick up a second one for him.[…]
Now, I get it. What Torrey did was a selfless act. Not in the same realm of giving up a kidney or the last taco, but still remarkable. He passed up the chance to make money so his friend could have a Wii-filled vacation. I was actually tearing up a bit when he [handed] it to me.
Unsurprisingly, I still have that Wii, and it was a source of joy for many years. While I haven’t played it in a long while, it—and the hours and hours of fun it generated over the years—remains a treasured touchtone of my friendship with Torrey.
Thank you Torrey for that unforgettable act of friendship, and Happy Birthday Wii!
Anna Betts, writing for The Guardian:
The satirical news outlet the Onion has purchased Infowars, the rightwing media platform run by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, at a court-ordered auction.
The news was confirmed on Thursday morning in a video by Jones himself, as well as the head of the Onion's parent company.
“[T]he head of the Onion’s parent company” is one “Bryce P. Tetraeder”, Global Tetrahedron CEO, who explained his reasons for the purchase on The Onion:
All told, the decision to acquire InfoWars was an easy one for the Global Tetrahedron executive board.
Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic “panic” and growing steadily ever since, InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses. With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal. They are a true unicorn, capable of simultaneously inspiring public support for billionaires and stoking outrage at an inept federal state that can assassinate JFK but can’t even put a man on the Moon.
Through it all, InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society—values that resonate deeply with all of us at Global Tetrahedron.
This both is, and isn’t, “an Onion story.”
The (supposedly real) CEO of The Onion, Ben Collins, wrote on Bluesky[1]:
Hi everyone.
The Onion, with the help of the Sandy Hook families, has purchased InfoWars.
We are planning on making it a very funny, very stupid website.
We have retained the services of some Onion and Clickhole Hall of Famers to pull this off.
I can't wait to show you what we have cooked up.
InfoWars was already “very stupid” so they only need to make it “very funny.” I have faith they can do that.
(Collins also included a link to a New York Times story as—I suppose—confirmation this wasn’t “an Onion story.” He should have chosen a more reputable site.)
Collins also wrote:
You better fucking subscribe to The Onion. This is the kind of thing we will do with your money.
It allowed us to buy InfoWars. Now help us staff it.
Done.
His Bluesky name, “Tim Onion,” is a swipe at Donald Trump, who once called Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, “Tim Apple.” I would have expected “Ben Onion” though. Perhaps that’s why I don’t run a globally beloved satire site. ↩︎
Jesse Sheidlower—an old acquaintance from our days on echonyc—with a welcome announcement a couple of weeks ago on Mastodon:
News: the 4th edition of The F-Word is coming out in two weeks from Oxford UP! Everything you could want to know about the word fuck.
This is a major revision: 500 pages with 150 new entries, 150 antedatings, & 2,500 new quotations.[…]
I already own the second edition, purchased in 2001, and it was one of the most fun reads I’ve ever had. I laughed my fucking ass off thumbing through it, all the while learning about my most-used expletive. I pre-ordered the fourth edition immediately, and it arrived today. Alas, it’s 25-fucking-hundred miles away from me, so I’ve had fuck-all chance to read it. Fuck.
Here’s Sheidlower’s description of the book:
The F-Word is a historical dictionary devoted to the word fuck, including all parts of speech, compounds, phrases, and certain euphemisms. A “historical dictionary” means that, like the Oxford English Dictionary, it illustrates every sense of every entry with quotations, from the earliest that can be found to a (relatively) recent example, showing exactly how the word has been used throughout history.
And:
This new, fourth edition (2024) is not just a minor update but a comprehensive revision. The fourth edition includes over 2,500 new quotations; over 150 new entries; and over 150 antedatings—earlier examples of existing entries, improving our understanding of the word’s development. Major new discoveries push back the known history of fuck by almost 200 years.
Sheidlower was an editor for the OED, so he understands comprehensive dictionaries, including the importance of antedating entries:
Many antedatings represent significant improvements in our knowledge of the word's history. The expression for fuck's sake, previously first recorded in 1943, is now known from 1922; fucked 'crazy' has been improved from 1971 to 1951, fuckload from 1984 to 1970, headfuck 'something that causes confusion' from 1993 to 1976, ratfuck 'a frenetic social event' from 1979 to 1969. In particular, research into early erotica has resulted in a number of major antedatings. The noun ass-fuck, previously first found in 1940, is now recorded in 1874; dogfuck has been improved from 1980 to 1867, face-fuck from 1972 to 1899, fuckstick 'the penis' from 1973 to 1904, mouth fuck from 1954 to 1868, and tongue fuck from 1974 to 1902.
It’ll be fucking great. I hope it sells a fuckton.
Nitish Pahwa, in a Slate piece densely packed with receipts:
Now that Trump is headed back to the White House, with X’s Elon Musk in tow, there is not even a pretense of hope on that platform for anyone who voted against Trump. It’s better late than never, but it’s well and truly time to cut X loose.
Maybe it seemed, once, that a spirited internal resistance could effectively limit Musk's damage and preserve some of the prior spirit of the microblogging platform that writers, public agencies, and other creative types had come to depend upon. I honestly cannot tell you what exactly was my justification for maintaining a Twitter/X presence, even as I explored other social media outfits and publicly acknowledged that Musk's regime was repelling masses of tweeters, boosting easily debunkable disinformation, shedding all of X's remaining utility for journalists, bullying transgender users, spreading straight-up white-supremacist rhetoric, and influencing CEOs in every other field to become as domineering and unapologetic as Musk is, whatever the backlash.
I refuse to fuel Musk’s algorithms with my content and attention. I started winding down my participation in October 2022 (after first trying to do so in 2018). I had several “professional obligations” on it at the time that made it impossible for me to fully disengage, but once those obligations no longer existed, I stopped posting on X/Twitter, and only read it when someone links to something over there.
(I then bleach my eyeballs, because yeeech.)
The only people still in the Nazi bar either are Nazis, like Nazis, or enjoy debating Nazis; or who—despite all the Nazi insignia, salutes, and propaganda surrounding them—still don’t believe they’re in a Nazi bar. Perhaps they’re busy nursing their carefully curated follow list in a back corner, and haven’t realized how many of their not-Nazi friends already left or are grabbing their coats. Or their friends are waiting on them to rise and head for the door so they can follow.
Or, perhaps, they don’t know better bars exist.
Today, the three meaningful alternatives to X/Twitter are Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon. I chose Mastodon, because it’s because it’s not owned by any (billionaire) individual, and it’s where most of my (generally geeky) people are. It’s big advantage is it’s decentralized: there are multiple servers talking to each other rather than one single, central server. A benefit of this is you can join a server based on topic or affinity (e.g. technology, journalism, or activism). The biggest downside? It’s decentralized, which requires you to choose a server (in the way you choose an email provider) with no easy way of comparing them, and the getting started process can be arduous for many non-techie folks.
More and more people are moving from X/Twitter, some 700,000 in a week to Bluesky alone, according to Jay Peters at The Verge:
Bluesky gained more than 700,000 new users in the last week and now has more than 14.5 million users total, Bluesky COO Rose Wang confirmed to The Verge. The “majority” of the new users on the decentralized social network are from the US, Wang says. The app is currently the number two free social networking app in the US App Store, only trailing Meta’s Threads.
That’s the second large influx recently:
The independent platform has seen a lot of growth in recent weeks — on October 24th, Bluesky announced it had 13 million users. After X’s recent announcement that it would let blocked users still see posts from the person that blocked them, for example, Bluesky said it added 500,000 new users in one day.
Many friends are happy on BlueSky. Some prefer Meta/Facebook’s Threads (though I’m not a fan of Mark Zuckerberg any more than I am of Elon Musk). I have accounts on both, mainly as a hedge, in case someone I really care about is active on one of them.
The Verge offers more specific advice on how to leave X/Twitter, including taking your account private, downloading your content, and eventually deactivating your account completely.
Regardless of which new social network you choose, it’s important to start the process now. The best time to leave a Nazi bar is the day it becomes one. The next best time is today.
It’s an odd feeling to be—in even a small way—celebrating seven years as an American citizen, just days after American democracy gave us, for the second time, a Donald Trump presidency.
Yet it is also fitting, as the reason I became an American citizen seven years ago was because American democracy gave us, for the first time, a Donald Trump presidency.
In 2016, despite living in America for thirty-five years, I wasn’t ever motivated to pursue my citizenship. There was no real reason, merely inertia. Lack of citizenship never stopped me from doing anything: As a permanent resident I could work legally, had most of the protections of being a citizen, and while I wasn’t always thrilled with the people America elected (hello Reagan, Bush, and Bush), the impact on my daily life was minimal.
In my Member Update #2, I wrote:
For my first decade or so in the U.S., I didn't care much for politics, and didn't really identify with a political party.
I only really started paying attention to politics during the Clinton administration. Because politics wasn’t huge in my life, neither was voting. I came close to applying for citizenship as I tracked Barack Obama’s rise—from a junior senator speaking at the DNC, through his historic nomination, election, and reelection—but the inertia was powerful. I deeply regret missing the opportunity to vote for him, or to be naturalized under his presidency.
After eight years of Barack Obama, I was excited by the possibility of following our first Black president with our first female president, but my first hint this wasn’t the timeline I thought it was came on February 16, 2016. I wrote in Day One:
Tonight, I fear for America.
Donald Trump won the Republican New Hampshire primary. […]
Trump would be an unmitigated disaster, and it’s going to ensure that I have my citizenship, so I can leave the country for more than six months at a time....
I wonder if there’s any chance of my getting it in time to vote?
It wouldn’t have been enough time, but it didn’t matter: I didn’t start the process.
Then this, on March 8:
It’s Time.
Trump has won Michigan and Mississippi. He won Michigan with over 37%; his nearest competitor is Kasich with 25% and Cruz with about 24%. He won Mississippi with 49%, with Cruz at 35%. This terrifies me. Trump has a legitimate shot at the nomination, and the presidency.
I included a link to 10 Steps to Naturalization, Understanding the Process of Becoming a U.S. Citizen.
I’d finally started the process, but there was no real urgency. I had faith in the American democratic system, and, like many people then (and many people this year) I was certain beyond any doubt Trump could not possibly win. I could wait, and would get to be naturalized under America’s first female president.
Yeah.
January 19, 2017:
Awake in a Marriott in Annapolis.
The end of Barack Obama’s administration is near and I’m sad and scared.
I never completed my citizenship papers and a small part of me worries it won’t go through.
Also sad that I’d be sworn in under Trump.
Sad indeed, but not enough to allow that distasteful prospect to deter me. His inauguration was the motivation I needed to finally complete the process: I felt it necessary to cloak myself in the protections of American Citizenship.
February 2, 2017:
Just mailed my citizenship application. I’m slightly short of breath.
I had a biometrics appointment a month later, and on August 30 I went in for my in-person interview, where they assessed my English reading and writing ability, along with my knowledge of U.S. history, the Constitution, and current politics.
The interview was a little nerve-racking, mostly because I feared vapor-locking while answering the civics questions, but I got through them with no issues.
At the end, the interviewer handed me my result form, with a big “X” next to “Congratulations! Your application is recommended for approval.” I unexpectedly choked up when he wished me luck, and only barely kept my emotions in check as I rose to leave.
I went home and poured myself the most American of spirits, bourbon—Jefferson’s Reserve, a hat-tip to our founding fathers.
Then, on November 9, 2017:
American Citizen!
So here I am, seven years after Donald Trump’s first inauguration, celebrating my citizenship and my right to vote, just days after millions of other Americans exercised theirs to vote for Donald Trump. Again.
Deja vu is a weird sensation.
It’s just after 4 a.m. on the East Coast as I post this, and I haven’t been able to sleep because it’s now clear that Donald Trump will again be president of the United States.
While it hasn’t yet been officially called by the AP or others, Trump sits at 267 Electoral College votes, with AK and its three electoral votes the only thing standing between him and victory. I suspect by the time the sun breaks over the Atlantic Ocean, Trump will have been declared the winner, with as many as 312 electoral votes.
What has become of this country?
Tens of millions of my supposedly “fellow” Americans consciously chose a demagogue and the vile hatred he and his followers represent. They knew the nastiness he offered, and they wanted it.
I admit that in my heart of hearts I was hoping for a Harris landslide, a blowout victory that repudiated MAGA politics. Instead, Trump has solidified his grasp on this country (when you’re a star, they let you do it).
Don’t ever tell me again this country isn’t deeply racist and misogynistic.
This election was about power: Who has it, who wields it, and who benefits from it.
Americans voted for their own self-interest: To keep themselves at the top of the food chain.
They understand that being a white male makes you untouchable, and being a white female confers the privilege of white men upon you.
A significant number of Latino voters also aligned themselves with Trump, perhaps out of a misguided attempt at self preservation, but equally likely out of an anti-immigrant “fuck you, I got mine” mentality.
I’ve seen a lot of people on Mastodon (and I’m guessing across most social media) saying they’ll fight Trump for the next four years.
Cool cool cool.
What makes them think he’ll allow that fight? Where will they take it? The courts? The press? Congress? The streets?
They have a lot of faith in the strength of institutions he’s pledged to destroy—or which have already capitulated well before his election.
The Supreme Court has granted him immunity. The press already has demonstrated deference. Congress will be a feckless lapdog. And protesters in the streets are likely to be met with a military presence—whether it’s U.S. military or Trump’s “Proud Boys.”
After what we’ve observed over the last decade+, and especially what Trump and his MAGA party have done and said they’ll do, what reason is there to believe he won’t shut down any protesters, with intimidation if not violence? We’ve seen it already.
And here’s a truth: Those with the energy to fight are often the ones who can just walk away from that fight without consequence.
The rest of us who can’t “blend in” are tired of having our souls crushed by an America we thought had our backs.
I’ve also seen people trotting out “we are better than this” and “this is not who we are”.
Bullshit.
It’s time to retire both phrases. We’ve proven we’re not “better than this.” We’ve shown this is “who we are.”
It’s been true for a long while, but there was always some amount of plausible deniability. It’s pretty damn hard to deny it now after this electoral outcome.
On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump gets sworn in for the second time. On that day, I expect The Great American Experiment will come to an end.
Seventy-five days.
It feels impossible to overstate the importance of this election. “The fate of our democracy hangs in the balance” seems somehow both overwrought and woefully insufficient. Yet that seems to be the stakes at play. We are choosing between Kamala Harris, who supports democracy; and Donald Trump, who has repeatedly expressed disdain for it.
An election between these two candidates—one, a prosecutor, Senator, and the sitting Vice President; the other a convicted criminal, adjudicated sexual assaulter, and twice-impeached former president—should be a cakewalk. That it’s a coin flip is terrifying, and for the next few days we’ll all be bundles of raw, vibrating nerves as we await the results.
While we’re unlikely to have a definitive winner tonight, I’m hoping we have a clear trend: that undecideds break for Harris, Democrats turn out in huge numbers for her, and Republicans, tired of the circus, vote for a president they can oppose without fear of retribution.
As I write this approaching 11 p.m. EST on election night, it’s not clear that America will repudiate Trump for a second time in two elections; in several places he’s doing better this year than he did last. It’s obviously still early, and there’s a lot of vote counting still to be done, but Trump’s continued (and growing) strength with a certain portion of the electorate is deeply concerning. The trends don’t seem to be trending toward Harris.
Keith Olbermann noted on a recent episode of The Countdown that
[…] there are people voting for Donald Trump today that were nine when he began his first campaign. They don’t know an America without a subculture of boastful stupidity and conspiracy.[…] They only know this shit.
Those 18 year olds have known only the divisiveness and anti-democratic rhetoric of Trump and MAGA Republicans. Many have grown up believing Trump is a “normal” politician, that his and MAGA policies are mainstream, and that democracy is about demonizing the other side.
That mindset may carry the day.
Like many of you, I’ll be glued to my screens tonight, in both anticipation and fear.
I started my evening feeling nervous but optimistic. Right now, as I write this, that optimism is starting to wane. The evening has shades of 2016, and that scares me beyond measure.
Speaking of Wallace and Gromit, they have a new adventure coming to Netflix (and the BBC in the UK). It’s the first new Wallace and Gromit film since 2008’s “A Matter of Loaf and Death”—and since the 2017 death of Peter Sallis, who brilliantly voiced Wallace in the previous shorts and movies.
“Vengeance Most Fowl” brings back one of my favorite characters, Feathers McGraw, apparently out for revenge after the events of “The Wrong Trousers”….
Watching “A Grand Day Out” today feels as joyful as it did when I first saw it decades ago. Guaranteed to put a smile on your face.
(Surprisingly, it’s available on the Internet Archive (and also on Amazon Prime.))
I absolutely adore Wallace and Gromit: The characters, the voices, the stories, and of course, the animation. I especially love the expressiveness of both of their faces.
All three short films (the other two being “The Wrong Trousers” and “A Close Shave”) and the feature length movies (“Curse of the Were-Rabbit”, “A Matter of Loaf and Death”) are wonderful and endearing masterpieces of animation and storytelling. Hard to believe it’s been 35 years since Nick Park first introduced us to these brilliant blobs of plasticine.
I wish I had some Wensleydale to celebrate.
(H/T The Spaceshipper.)
AP, with a heart-of-the-matter headline:
Yankees blow 5-run lead with epic defensive meltdown as Dodgers rally to clinch World Series
Mike Fitzpatrick, writing the story for AP:
Just when it appeared Aaron Judge and the New York Yankees were right back in this World Series, they all but gave away the trophy.
An epic meltdown of defensive miscues, beginning with Judge's embarrassing error in center field, helped the Los Angeles Dodgers rally in a five-run fifth inning that tied the score at 5.
As much as I detest watching the Dodgers win, I very much enjoy seeing the Yankees lose, especially in their own house, in front of their awful fans[1], and in come-from-behind fashion.
Pinstripe Alley has a good recap of that disastrous fifth inning, calling it
one of the worst innings in the Yankees’ long, storied history.
Thomas Carannante writing for FanSided:
Care to know how many teams facing World Series elimination blew a five-run lead and lost? Zero! Care to know how many times in World Series history a team blew a five-run lead and lost? Six ... out of 233. It was an historic choke job that takes this franchise's modern day failures to new heights.
I didn’t watch the game, but I’ll definitely do so now, so I can delight in this Yankees disaster.
Yes, I’m a petty, petty man.
The Yankees should cancel the season tickets of these two “fans.” I hope they banned from visiting every MLB ballpark in the country. Heck, they should be banned from attending Little League games. What they did was egregious and could have resulted in a sprained or broken wrist. If I were Mookie Betts, I’d sue for assault. ↩︎
Clever, unexpected, and immediately understandable: The M4 is powerful enough to make seemingly impossible tasks easy, even elegant.
Simply perfect.
Apple had a busy week of product announcements, in an unusual format. Instead of an in-person event, or a single keynote-style video presentation, three classes of products were announced over three days via press release and 10-15 minute videos.
Apple today announced the new iMac, featuring the powerful M4 chip and Apple Intelligence, in its stunning, ultra-thin design.
The new iMac now offers a $200 nano-texture option for the display; I have it on my M4 iPad Pro and it’s fantastic for eliminating reflections and glare. As with the iPad Pro, though, it’s not an option on the entry-level configuration, so you’ll also pay at least another $200 just to unlock the nano-texture, technically making it a $400 upgrade, assuming you weren’t already in the market for the extra CPU power, gigabit ethernet, and four total Thunderbolt 4 ports.
The new colors are very pretty (if muted); great for those who, unlike me, want a pop of color in their computer. As before, the mouse/trackpad/keyboard accessories are color-matched, and now sport USB-C instead of lightning (finally!), although the mouse still charges from the bottom—a location I’ve never understood. I did appreciate John Gruber’s recent defense of its placement, though.
The iMac can also drive two 6K external displays alongside the built-in 24” display, which makes for a phenomenal battlestation. If I was an all-in-one person (rather than a laptop-and-monitor person), this would be a great system.
Apple today unveiled the all-new Mac mini powered by the M4 and new M4 Pro chips, and redesigned around Apple silicon to pack an incredible amount of performance into an even smaller form of just 5 by 5 inches. […]
For more convenient connectivity, it features front and back ports, and for the first time includes Thunderbolt 5 for faster data transfer speeds on the M4 Pro model.
The big story here is that the new Mac mini is mini-er: Less than half the desk footprint of the previous mini (though a tad taller).
This is a device for which I have zero need yet desperately want to buy, simply for the cool factor. I have a barely used M1 Mac mini that I may have to trade in. The boost in CPU and data transfer might make it a phenomenal Blu-ray ripper and in-home video streamer.
[…] the 14-inch MacBook Pro includes the blazing-fast performance of M4 and three Thunderbolt 4 ports […]
The 14- and 16-inch models with M4 Pro and M4 Max offer Thunderbolt 5 for faster transfer speeds and advanced connectivity. All models include a Liquid Retina XDR display that gets even better with an all-new nano-texture display option and up to 1000 nits of brightness for SDR content, an advanced 12MP Center Stage camera, along with up to 24 hours of battery life, the longest ever in a Mac.
I’m a huge fan of the 14” MacBook Pro. The Liquid Retina XDR display on my M2 MacBook Pro is stunning, and as I mentioned above, I love the nano-texture display on my iPad Pro; having it on my laptop would be fantastic. Good news: The $150 nano-texture option is available on the base model MacBook Pro.
Adding Thunderbolt 5, a nano-texture display option, a brighter display, and 24-hour battery life makes this a near-perfect laptop. If I could only have one computer, it would be the 14” MacBook Pro. I find it the perfect combination of portable and powerful.
All it needs is cellular capabilities. (Maybe next year.)
Each press release touted—via the same boilerplate—support for Apple Intelligence:
Apple Intelligence ushers in a new era for the Mac, bringing personal intelligence to the personal computer. Combining powerful generative models with industry-first privacy protections, Apple Intelligence harnesses the power of Apple silicon and the Neural Engine to unlock new ways for users to work, communicate, and express themselves on Mac.
I’m excited to experience Apple Intelligence, though most of the features I’m interested in—primarily those driven by “personal context”—won’t come until (I presume) 2025.
My experience so far with the available Apple Intelligence features has been ho-hum. The notification and email summaries are interesting, though not terribly useful in most instances.
For example, a pair of Amazon notifications, the first telling me a package is 10 stops away, the second saying it was delivered, was summarized as “Package delivered, currently 10 stops away.”
I know Apple Intelligence will improve over time, so I’m not going to ding it just yet, except to say Apple is really pushing it as a reason to buy new hardware, and I think most early purchasers will be disappointed, at least initially.
Remember: Never buy hardware for the promise of what it will do in the future. Buy for what it’s capable of doing today.
The new M4 looks pretty damn powerful, and it wouldn’t surprise me if most people buying one won’t need to upgrade it for many, many years. (I wonder what impact that will have on Apple’s sales in the long-term?)
If you currently have an Intel-based Mac (or PC), even the most entry-level M4 Mac will be a massive upgrade in speed. For some, like a medical student I was speaking with recently who owned a 2017 Intel-based Mac, even a refurbished M1 or M2 Mac would be noticeably faster (not to mention lighter and less noisy) than what they now use.
Apple hardware has never been more powerful and capable, and with such low power and cooling needs. I’m salivating at the possibility of some radically redesigned computers in the near future.
A few days ago—after a brutal Mets loss to the Dodgers—I snarked on Mastodon:
A Dodgers/Yankees matchup would be my worst nightmare.
Zero rooting interest. Turn off the television.
Welp, here we are.
Growing up a New York Mets fan, I’m vehemently anti-Yankees. As a San Francisco resident and Giants fan for the last quarter century, I unconditionally detest the Dodgers.
As storied as Yankees/Dodgers World Series matchups have been historically—11 of them going back to 1941, including Don Larsen’s perfect game in 1956 (still the only one pitched), Sandy Koufax’s 15-strikeout complete game in 1963, and Reggie Jackson’s 3-home runs on three consecutive pitches from three different pitchers in 1977—the idea of supporting either team makes me violently ill.
My rooting rules are uncomplicated [1] :
Yes, that sometimes meant rooting for a Central Division or American League team if they were up against the Yankees or Dodgers, but it was always worth it. Nothing was more important than those two teams losing.
But facing each other? Sometimes the rules, much like Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, result in an untenable situation which, if left unresolved, may end with a catastrophic core meltdown.
So my solution is easy: Don’t watch the games.
I’m probably not the only one.
Sure, some won’t watch because this is a “coastal elites” match up of Evil New York against Hollywood Los Angeles, both with their big money, big name players—the middle of the country naturally roots against both as easily as I do—there’s a bigger reason this Series is likely to be ignored by the masses.
Keith Olbermann explains on his mosty-politics-but-somtimes-sports Countdown podcast:
The famous Yankees and Dodgers are actually two of the most disastrously underperforming franchises in sports. If you consider the year 2000 as the last year of the 20th century, the Yankees have won one World Series in this century. Even if you don’t, they’ve won one World Series since 2000. The Dodgers have won one World Series in a full season since 1965.
Nobody cares about these teams because they’ve basically sucked for a generation. On top of that, baseball itself has changed—for the worse—since the turn of the century[2].
Olbermann again:
The long regular season and the quick playoffs were designed to establish which team was best that year. You played and you played and you played from Spring to Summer into Fall and you beat everybody in your league. And then you faced the team that had played and beaten everybody in their league.
And the result was a Series that was always novel and fresh and exciting and faced pitchers against hitters they’d never seen before.
Today, with Interleague play, “balanced” schedules, the extended Wild Card playoffs, and the National League adoption of the Designated Hitter rule (barf), the regular season is boring, the playoffs are boring, and—because the World Series teams already faced each other during the regular season, as the Yankees and Dodgers did in June—the World Series matchups end up being... boring.
Olbermann, once again:
It is believed about 60 million people watched game 7 of the 1986 World Series[3] on television.
If 60 million people watch the entirety of this World Series on television, if that’s the total audience for seven games, they will hold two parades afterward: One for the winning team and one for all the TV and advertising executives.
And by the away, if they get sixty million total audience on TV, the ad executives and the TV executives will get drunker than the winning players do.
And his coup de grâce:
We’re just amazed that the two best teams on paper are actually in the World Series, and how did they get there? They beat the wildcard teams.
Winning against the fourth place team. Congrats?
Mets/Giants and Eastern/Western is usually determined by which team gets into the playoffs, and which Division goes the furthest. If the Mets and Giants meet, I default to my ancestral team, the Mets. ↩︎
There’s phrase to make you feel old. ↩︎
The New York Mets vs. the Boston Red Sox, the series that cemented my baseball fandom. Most fans remember Game 6 for the Mookie Wilson/Bill Buckner Incident. I remember nearly having a panic attack watching that game. ↩︎
Apple, via Newsroom:
Apple today introduced the new iPad mini, supercharged by the A17 Pro chip and Apple Intelligence, the easy-to-use personal intelligence system that understands personal context to deliver intelligence that is helpful and relevant while protecting user privacy. With a beloved ultraportable design, the new iPad mini is available in four gorgeous finishes, including a new blue and purple, and features the brilliant 8.3-inch Liquid Retina display. A17 Pro delivers a huge performance boost for even the most demanding tasks, with a faster CPU and GPU, a 2x faster Neural Engine than the previous-generation iPad mini, and support for Apple Intelligence.
The new iPad mini features all-day battery life and brand-new experiences with iPadOS 18. Starting at just $499 with 128GB — double the storage of the previous generation — the new iPad mini delivers incredible value and the full iPad experience in an ultraportable design. Customers can pre-order the new iPad mini today, with availability beginning Wednesday, October 23.
From the iPad mini comparison chart, the two significant upgrades are the A17 Pro (vs. an A15 Bionic) and 128GB storage minimum. The A17 Pro is the same chip used in last year’s iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max; technically a generation old, but enough for Apple Intelligence.
(I can’t help but wonder whether the storage bump will increase useable space, or if the OS and Apple Intelligence will take up most of it.)
There’s also improved WiFi (6E vs. 6, though I’m unclear of the real world difference in WiFi speeds), and new colors: blue (replacing pink) and a different (seemingly lighter) shade of purple.
It also adds support for Apple Pencil Pro. If you aren’t aware of the differences between this, the Apple Pencil (2nd generation), and the Apple Pencil (USB‑C), don’t worry, you’re not alone. In brief, Pencil Pro adds barrel roll, haptic feedback, Find My support, and hover.
This otherwise minor (but absolutely necessary) speed bump may explain why it garnered nothing more than a press release.
What strikes me as odd is that it was announced ahead of an expected end-of-October Apple event, and without a corresponding iPad-no-modifiers.
The obvious reason is that Apple wants to focus on new Mac hardware and not confuse things by having iPads thrown into the mix.
But does this then suggest there might not be any iPad announcements in that event? Or, as some are theorizing, no event at all? Both would surprise me.
The iPad Air (11” and 13”) sports an M2, making it Apple Intelligence-ready while positioning it below the M4 iPad Pro. Plus the Air was just updated in May of this year; no reason to update it again so soon.
That’s not true of the current (10th-generation) no-modifiers-iPad. It’s $349, and it’s likely Apple’s best selling iPad by far, but it can’t handle Apple Intelligence: Its A14 Bionic chip is a generation older than the one in the outgoing 6th generation iPad mini. I can’t imagine Apple would let its most popular iPad lag behind without support for Apple Intelligence, so why not update it now, in a joint press release with the iPad mini?
Three possibilities:
A second press release a day or a week later for the same product line seems odd, and perhaps without precedent. Announcing both iPad and iPad mini together would make sense: they don’t really cannibalize each other, and can be messaged as “Our New iPad Lineup Is Ready for Apple Intelligence,” a statement that is glaringly untrue today.
Would Apple announce an 11th generation iPad-with-no-modifiers at an otherwise-Mac-focused event? Sure, as the appetizer to the main course, but then, why not include the iPad mini?
The final possibility is rather intriguing: What if there’s no update to the iPad-with-no-modifiers, because that iPad is going away? That leaves us with a classic Good/Better/Best scenario: iPad Mini (A17 Pro, Good), iPad Air (M2, Better), iPad Pro (M4, Best).
But would Apple drop its likely best-selling iPad to execute this strategy? I’m having a tough time believing that.
My guess: A significantly upgraded iPad is coming. M4-based is a strong possibility, but my money (today) is on an A18 or A18 Pro (likely)[1], the same chips in the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro. The performance delta between it and the iPad mini would explain the latter’s press release treatment: No need call attention to the new iPad mini using last year’s chip.
I’ll also guess it kicks off a late-October event, before Tim and team focus on M4 Macs.
Jason Snell at SixColors notes “that the A18 doesn’t support USB 3 speeds, which the previous iPad mini supported.” The A14 Bionic on the current no-modifier iPad only supports USB 2.0, so A18 won’t be a downgrade, but I suspect moving to USB 3 is too valuable, so I updated my “likely” to the A18 Pro. ↩︎