Category: Words

Newsletter: Watch Out For This Flag

We’re headed into the end of the decade, which means we’re going to see a lot of wrapups and retrospectives. “The Worst Takes of the 2010s” is at least fun. Ish. But my favorite meaningless speculation is about what we’ll call this next decade. Last time around, it was roaring. Of course, it was at least 1925 and probably closer to 1930 before people started calling it that. But my vote for this decade is burning.

Just as a reminder about the stakes here

Twitter comedy interlude

DOCTOR: I have good news and bad news

ME: Oh no, what’s the bad news

DR: The earth is dying and we will run out of natural resources in 10 years

ME: Uh wow, what’s the good news

DR: You won’t be around to worry about it

— Michael Enjoys the Work of Helen Hunt 🌶 (@Home_Halfway) November 27, 2019

The cruelty is the point

If you haven’t seen it on the back of pickup trucks recently, you ought to be aware of this flag, which is labeled as a ‘blue live matter’ flag. That blue line represents police, standing between society and disorder. Disorder, of course, represented by, you know… *looks around nervously* a bad element.

cop-flag

People who fly this flag claim to support the police, but they know what they’re doing: this is a taunt. When Black people assert that their lives matter, this flag yells back: “No they don’t.”It is, fundamentally, a fascist flag, asserting the primacy of the armed force of the state over civilian lives. That’s one reason why it’s so beloved by Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, whose entire appeal to voters is that he stands between (Black) Baltimore and (White) suburban Marylanders.

So, if you don’t know, now you know. You’ll see the flag around. Watch out for people flying it.

I can’t actually tell if Trump’s “Jews are a Nationality” rule is just a weird Title VI end-run, but it certainly rhymes with ominous historical antecedents. That graphic novel about Weimar-era Berlin is seeming pretty relevant these days.

Cultivating Joy

At least this cat is cute
If you don’t already know them, I also recommend Bowie the Cat (who does bear a resemblance to David Bowie) and Fig, an incredibly tiny little dog in Philadelphia.

Hot new disaster trends for the burning 20s

We got to go to Delos this week, the highlight of a long-delayed honeymoon trip. The whole island is currently a museum and UNESCO world heritage site with maybe 14 residents, all of them archaeologists. Everyone else can visit for the day, usually via ferry from nearby resort-heavy Mykonos.

Delos been mostly uninhabited for centuries, but its status as the mythological birthplace of Apollo and Artemis made it an important holy site for almost a thousand years leading up to the first century BC. In 478 BC, it became the neutral capital of the Athens-dominated Delian League. Although it traded hands a few times, it prospered as a port and slave-trading center for hundreds of years, making it very wealthy indeed.

A series of pirate attacks culminated in 69 BC with a thorough sacking and looting. As trade routes shifted, people moved away. As worship of Apollo faded, people moved away. It simply didn’t matter any more. It’s been an archaeological site since 1872. What’s there is stunning: an entire town reduced to its crumbling walls, an enormous theater, faded mosaics of Dionysus in banquet rooms that undoubtedly hosted epic orgies. A number of key statues have been moved for preservation and replaced with replicas, including the melted-looking Naxian Lions and a famous depiction of Aphrodite smilingly beating Pan with a shoe. What’s missing is more significant: all the metal. All the wood. All the cloth. Even a lot of the stone. There’s a giant marble plinth with notes about the enormous statue of Apollo that it used to hold. The British Museum has a foot, the Athens Museum a hand. The head is long since stolen and lost. A lot of the body was apparently chopped up and used in other sculptures or buildings.

In other words, the entire place is a monument to hubris and a reminder of the fragility of empire and stone and everything we build or do.

And after a few hours of being humbled by ancient ruins, we turned around and got back on the ferry to Mykonos, with its new port served by cruise ships and its old port served by mega-yachts, the water coming up just to the edge of the charming bars and restaurants of Little Venice. And its adorable street cats. Not long after that, we got on a plane and flew halfway around the world, spewing carbon dioxide all the way. So today I feel humbled, and hypocritcal, and troubled by the rhymes of history.

(Coincidentally, the song “Mykonos” by Fleet Foxes is about someone failing to get sober after a trip to rehab in Mykonos. I don’t know why anyone would attempt rehab there. Mykonos seems like it would be one of the worst possible places in the world to get sober. Our hotel’s welcome book actually included a brochure for an IV rehydration hangover treatment.)

The collapse approaches
Climate change is shifting wine regions around.

Climate migration has begun to appear in the US, although it’s still more notable in Siberia.

Your context sets your expectation, which is why the climate apocalypse seems totally normal. (There are roughly half as many birds as there were just a hundred years ago…)

A second example: one Key Largo neighborhood, already used to intermittent fall flooding, has been substantially flooded for more than 40 days. “For us now, this is normal life,” one resident says.

Most maps of Louisiana are inaccurate; subsidence, erosion, and rising sea levels are shrinking the coastline faster than maps can keep up.

California’s blackouts are another glimpse into the climate change future. So are preparations for the Tokyo Olympics, where a badly timed heatwave would potentially kill spectators and athletes alike.

And also
A map of concentration camps in America.

Searing short memoir/long blog post about family, abuse, internalized racism, and redpill toxicity.

Fun
Not from The Onion: Fire sparks mass explosion of semen at cattle breeding centre.

This is just super cool.

Nothing is Real

I’ve been thinking recently about the end of objective reality. Not in any objective and real sense, of course. Objective reality is still out there. But how do we know what it is?

The New York Times, still the paper of record (or so I’m told) employs a columnist who thinks that masturbation is somehow harmful. (This is an actual thing he said, not some screenshot fake. I think.)

Schools are obliged to teach facts but abstain from opinion and religious instruction. So… they also avoid teaching about World War II, because that might not have actually been a thing? That dude got rapidly reassigned. At least, the totally fake Washington Post says he did. And how can we trust the news outlet owned by some rich dude with an agenda, especially one that can’t even report on a hurricane with any accuracy?

We can all joke about how this year is the 50th anniversary of when they faked the moon landing, but David Brooks is this very moment allying himself with the very reputable Jewish magazine Tablet to try and redeem the wildly antisemitic trope of “cultural Marxism.” Does the Prime Minister of Israel believe in the race “science” he’s been pushing? (I mean, someone claims he’s doing it? I mean, it’s still live on his official account, so maybe that’s actually a thing that’s happening?)

Did Kellyanne Conway actually just ask a journalist their ethnicity? Did journalists finally call the president on his environmental bullshittery? Is the veil finally coming off the Atwater-era lie about the Republican not being racist to its very core?

Did a Nobel-Prize winning economist just use the n-word six times in a single column in the New York fucking Times?

Will Deepfakes make these questions harder to answer and less relevant to ask?

Anyway, truth is dead and so are we. Eat Arby’s.

Cultivating Joy (Probably. These GIFs are too good to fact-check)
A squirrel began hoarding nuts inside this cellular antenna. It hoarded a LOT of nuts. Or maybe that’s just what anti-5G conspiracy theorists WANT you to believe!
Can a bird play peekaboo? Who knows. Could be faked. Don’t care.
Pretty sure humans are dumb enough that this is 100% factual.

Newsletter: Once more for the people in the back

According to KnowYourMeme.com, contemporary use of the phrase “this is fine” to mean the exact opposite comes from a comic called Gunshow. The specific strip featuring the dog in the burning building denying that anything is wrong is subtitled “The Pills Are Working.”
this-is-fine

See also “having a normal one,” or “having a very normal day,” meaning losing your goddamn mind.

So, anyway.
As white supremacist protestors were escorted off the National Mall this week, they exchanged fist-bumps with police.
As Ed Burmila warned us a year ago, Trump is determined to emulate Australia’s disastrous and inhumane immigration policies.
University of Alaska faces 41% budget cut.
ProPublica got access to a secret CBP/ICE employee Facebook group featuring roughly 9,500 members trading horrific racist jokes about dead migrants. Meanwhile, border agency staff are killing themselves in record numbers.
The poll tax returns to Florida.

And in creeping horror news
Climate change promises an increase in “supernests” of yellowjackets and other wasps, formed when mild winters permit more of a colony to survive throughout a year. These nests can grow to the size of compact cars and house tens of thousands of wasps at once.

BLDGBLOG notes that this would be the perfect setting for a post-apocalyptic horror movie: “unwary climate refugees of the near-future hiking through the forests of a superheated American South… approaching a super nest the size of train yard, its buzzing mistaken for the hopeful drone of distant machinery. ”

And also
This incredible drowned town.
This series of black NYC history tweets.
Toronto’s Garfield-themed restaurant.

Cultivating joy
This almost circular dog.
This high-jumping cat.

Deep Inside the Amethyst Mines

A few weeks ago someone asked me what I do for work, and I had a very hard time coming up with an answer that fit into just a few words. I don’t know why I didn’t come up with something exciting and funny (Amethyst broker to the stars! Sex instructor! Marijuana sommelier!), or simple and accurate (nonprofit marketing freelancer). But I was stumped. I hesitated. What do I even do? Who am I? How did I get here? (Letting the days go by…)

More recently, I made a political donation and the form required me to list my occupation and employer. I started to write down my title and the hospital where I’m currently working, but then I realized that’s not strictly accurate. I don’t work for the hospital. I work for a temp agency that’s a subsidiary of a larger temp-agency holding company.

So I put down “temp” and the name of my sub-agency, since I can’t actually remember the name of the holding company. Then I felt sort of insignificant and temporary. And then I reminded myself that we shouldn’t let ourselves be defined by our jobs but by ourselves: “in a society where you are what you do full-time — and you’re only as good as how much you earn doing it — identifying yourself as anything can feel like a form of hubris.”

And then I went and listened to the song “Amethyst” by Low forty or fifty times on repeat. The color bleeds and fades to white…

This is fine dot gif
Trump takes out an enormous loan under suspicious circumstances.
Deutsche Bank employees say they were overruled when Trump family transactions raised money-laundering flags.
The IRS has basically stopped auditing the very wealthy.
This cop is probably not going to get in trouble for these hijinks.
Border patrol agent charged with running over a migrant.

Simple shareable infographics

abortion-infographic

This is now how humor headlines work

Linguistic joy

The Buzzfeed style guide is the definitive resource for correct spelling on the internet. Not sure whether “O-face” gets a hyphen and a capital O? Buzzfeed will tell you it does! Unsure of the correct number of r’s to put into the Cardi B catchphrase “okurrr?” Buzzfeed knows! It’s a minimum of three, but more if you’re really emphatic about that affirmative. Okurrrrrrr?

Also, the word “lox” may be one of the English words most resistant to change in meaning or sound.

Cute joy
Liquid cat
Bow-legged bird
Werner Herzog likes cat videos

Austerity

You guys, I’m starting to think these fascist idiots shouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near the levers of power.

I can’t even with the absolute idiocy of the people trying to legislate medical procedures.

So, let’s talk economic policy: Misguided austerity policies have impoverished people all over Europe and the US, but the NYT has an incredibly crushing example of how it’s played out Cumbria, abandoned by the young, by bus service, by hospitals. If you read nothing of the article, just know that it ends with someone lamenting that “it would have been a wonderful place to die.”

Actually, no. You know what, they all sort of go together. “Pro-life” legislators close rural hospitals, urban hospitals, family-planning clinics, sexual-education programs, childcare programs… and then claim Democrats are the party of death.

Seriously. What timeline is it when you have to check whether you’re reading a news parody site when the headline is “Abused 12-Year-Old Alabama Girl Doesn’t Think She Can Handle Being A Mom On Top Of Everything Else?”

Mainstream Republicans
Turning Point USA is a college-Republican group. A leader at the Las Vegas chapter has recently been ousted after a video of him went viral. Guess what he was saying?

Nearly half of white Republicans are bothered when they hear someone speaking a foreign language.

The president just pardoned a war criminal.

That Coast Guard guy who got caught planning a murderous anti-leftist rampage is now out on bail because he doesn’t seem like a threat to the people who judge threats.

Texas Rep Jonathan Stickland (R-Bedford) has accused a pediatrician of sorcery. The sorcery in question is vaccination.

Cultivating joy
This bunny is in disguise as a potato.
This cat is cuddling in a paperback.
“There’s a lot going on here.”
You absolutely must watch this whole video.
Dog plays Jenga.

The Snack that Doesn’t Love You Back

Burger King is the latest company to use depression as a marketing tool, marketing hamburgers for when you want an angry meal, defiant meal, or DGAF meal instead of a happy meal. They clearly have not taken notes from the brief flirtation the Coca-Cola company made with the same concept when it launched OK Soda, the adequate beverage for giving up on your dreams and accepting mediocrity.

(What stage of capitalism are we in where fast food chains care more about mental health than most public officials?)

Hindsight will be 2020
Paul Krugman has a warning about the old white guys running for office this year: they are arrogant enough to think they can transcend partisanship. Biden thinks he can “reach across the aisle” and Sanders thinks he can sweep across divides with idealistic policy. Neither seems to grasp what will actually happen if Dems take the presidency but the Senate and Supreme Court are still dominated by what’s basically a rebooted John Birch Society. Speaking of which…

Mainstream Republican Values
The Florida legislature is basically using a poll tax to avoid implementing a ballot measure that would allow ex-cons to vote.

Here is an official statement from the White House, claiming that Democrats kill babies:

Let me reiterate: the Vice-President of the United States is claiming that his opponents are in favor of legal infanticide. This is how you incite murder. This is how you get support for refusal to cede power after losing an election.

And as if on cue, we have an article titled “Nobody’s sure how seriously to take Trump’s suggestion he’s owed two extra years in office.”

You guys, I’m starting to think this fascist demagogue should never have been allowed anywhere near the levers of power.

Twitter

This thread. My lord, this thread:

The Future Is Now
The BBC has a report on what they’re calling the “post-natural age” and man is it going to be weird and beautiful and weird.

Scientific American notes that seasonal allergies are made worse by the fact that municipal arborists and home gardeners alike tend to plant mostly male trees, since they don’t drop fruit and therefore are less messy.

Cultivating Joy
This roly-poly cat is pretty adorable I guess.

The Death of the Rock Star

The other day, Spotify recommended me a playlist of new rock music, which is something of a reminder that rock music is now a specialty genre. Even before 2017, when hip-hop officially became the most popular genre in the US, rock was in a decline behind pop and hip-hop and r&b. But when the Coachella music festival didn’t even have any rock acts in the lineup, it was pretty clear that rock had lost its salience to the broad popular-music consumer audience.

They just don’t seem to be minting any new rock stars these days. Quick, name a rocker under 60. (Subscriber #7, I’m sure you can, but come on, Ty Segall is a niche artist.) Jack White, maybe? He’s well-known enough, I guess, but I bet you he can still walk down the street without being mobbed by fans.

So, rock stars are fading away. But the metaphorical “rock star” is still everywhere. Post Malone’s mumbled hip-hop anthem “Rockstar” was at the top of the charts for weeks, Rockstar energy drink is in every corner store, Rockstar Games is the video game company, and every other job listing describes what they want in a “rock star” contributor.

What do we even mean by “rock star” in the post-rock era?

Post Malone obviously means excess and debauchery (and the scene has definitely gotten excessive and debauched—this profile of flavor-of-the-week rapper Lil Pump is horrifying and sad). Rockstar energy drink just means everything’s turned all the way up: loud music, bright graphics, assertively gross energy drink flavors, and way too much caffeine. Rockstar games… yeah, also excess, both in the games themselves and in the long hours it takes to produce them.

What do employers mean by rock star? Not getting drunk and trashing the conference room, but still someone whose skills and performance earn them leeway for misbehavior. And obviously, a dude. (How many of you thought about Meg White when I mentioned her ex-husband Jack? Aside from subscriber #7?)

I’m guessing that in a few years, we’ll think of that metaphor as yet another overlooked sign of something amiss in our culture. (Although not that overlooked, given the number of articles with titles like “You Shouldn’t Hire That Rock Star Candidate“).

Anyway, one of the new rock songs bouncing around is called Sawed-Off Shotgun. It’s about giving in to mental illness, addiction, and pointless violence. Good times. If it ever gets any radio play, I look forward to finding out whether they bleep the words “shotgun” and “oxycodone” the way they would in a hip-hop song.

Not Good

Hey you know the viral video of cops killing Eric Garner? Here’s what happened to the guy who shot the video. It’s… not good. Rat poison is involved.

Hey, you know ICE? Here’s how they do warrants. It’s… not good.

Some supervisors even gave their officers pre-signed blank warrants — in effect, illegally handing them the authority to begin the deportation process.

Hey, you remember what happened after Baltimore police were acquitted in the death of Freddie Gray? Cops rapidly decided that rather than comply with rules against brutalizing the citizenry, they’d just quit doing their jobs. Results were … not good.

The department’s officers responded swiftly, by doing nothing. In Baltimore it came to be known as “the pullback”: a monthslong retreat from policing, a protest that was at once undeclared and unmistakably deliberate — encouraged, some top officials in the department at the time believe, by the local police union.
…
Batts admitted he was having trouble getting officers to do their job. “I talked to them again about character and what character means,” he told me and other reporters following a City Council hearing.

That’s the truly cruel thing about it. We actually do need law enforcement, and too many poor and minority communities suffer from a paradoxical combination of not enough law enforcement and too much policing.

Mainstream Republicans
Rob Bishop (R-UT) claims that a Green New Deal is tantamount to genocide.
Republican voters in Pennsylvania explain their fears: melanin and socialism.

Not Mainstream
A Seattle radio host claims that triplexes and zoning reform are a socialist conspiracy. (Oddly, socialists often oppose similar changes by claiming they’re part of a neoliberal developer conspiracy…)

Cultivating Joy
Library forced to close when a moose takes a lengthy nap near the door.
Fainting goats are always a good time.
This dog is not very good at agility, but he is a very good dog who brings joy to those who watch him wander off-piste to beg judges to pet him, then start lounging in the cozy tunnel obstacle.
The entire Instagram account Round.Boys is awesome but this almost globular little puffball of a puppy is so, so, so good.

A few words about the economy

A brilliant little essay came across my feeds last week, from a fashion/not-fashion blog called Man Repeller. It’s about this temptation to “rise & grind,” to monetize every hobby and make it a side-hustle:

We live in the era of the hustle. Of following our dreams until the end, and then pushing ourselves more. And every time we feel beholden to capitalize on the rare places where our skills and our joy intersect, we underline the idea that financial gain is the ultimate pursuit. If we’re good at it, we should sell it. If we’re good at it and we love it, we should definitely sell it.

As it turns out, turning a passion into a career is not always a path to happiness. It can be a path to an unbalanced life.

I hadn’t thought about it much, to be honest, but it resonates with me. When I was writing a lot of poetry, I didn’t try to get it published. When I started this newsletter, I didn’t even consider signing up for Patreon and asking people to contribute. I already have several jobs. I don’t need another. Yet.

Polarization
I have a recurring disagreement with one of my subscribers (hi Dad!) about whether it’s important to respect  conservatives and engage seriously with their ideas, since they’re our fellow countrymen and we owe it to them, even if we disagree.

But major conservative donor and influencer Jerry Falwell Jr. came up on stage at a major convention recently and threatened to shoot Rep. Ocasio-Cortez as a cattle rustler. He’s also known for wishing more people carried guns to shoot Muslims. So, maybe let’s not?

I’m not the only one saying this. Brad DeLong, a self-described “Rubin Democrat” and well-known moderate Democrat, says the Democratic Socialists should drive the bus now, since being a moderate requires a good-faith negotiator on the right side of the aisle, and his team of moderates were clearly wrong when they thought they could find a middle path through compromise:

“Barack Obama rolls into office with Mitt Romney’s health care policy, with John McCain’s climate policy, with Bill Clinton’s tax policy, and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy,” DeLong notes. “And did George H.W. Bush, did Mitt Romney, did John McCain say a single good word about anything Barack Obama ever did over the course of eight solid years? No, they fucking did not.”

Longreads, Shortreads
Forthcoming from Princeton University Press: Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?

Don’t trust low unemployment numbers as proof that the labor market is doing fine—it isn’t. Not Working is about those who can’t find full-time work at a decent wage—the underemployed—and how their plight is contributing to widespread despair, a worsening drug epidemic, and the unchecked rise of right-wing populism.

Now from The Onion: Pros & Cons of Congestion Pricing. (Market urbanism is hilarious don’t @ me).

WTF, Possibly NSFW
CES, the global consumer electronics expo, issued an award to a woman-led company for its groundbreaking work on female sexual health. Then they rescinded the award, claimed the product was obscene, and banned the company from even attending the expo. Par for the course in the consumer electronics space.

(Yes, I’m aware that I am linking to an article about the downsides of entrepreneur-obsessed hustle culture and to an article from a newsletter about entrepreneurship called The Hustle. I contain multitudes).

See also: Fake doctor sex expert.

Papers, Please
Mentally ill veteran born in the US was carrying his passport when arrested but still spent 3 days in ICE custody.

Cultivating Joy
This bird is very odd looking. (Twitter)
These blokes arguing about a pet emu (click for sound) (Twitter)
Puffin with a rainbow full of tiny fish in its beak. (Nat Geo)
These cats sitting on glass tables are just the best. (Insta)
A dog thrilled to go on a walk after leaving a shelter. (Twitter)

Ineffective surveillance, Apartment Construction Trends, Pangolins, Prince

The best thing I read this month was titled Forget privacy, you’re terrible at targeting anyway.

This is, by the way, the dirty secret of the machine learning movement: almost everything produced by ML could have been produced, more cheaply, using a very dumb heuristic you coded up by hand, because mostly the ML is trained by feeding it examples of what humans did while following a very dumb heuristic. There’s no magic here.
…
Anyone can, in a few seconds, think of some stuff they really want to buy which The Algorithm has failed to offer them, all while Outbrain makes zillions of dollars sending links about car insurance to non-car-owning Manhattanites. It might as well be a 1990s late-night TV infomercial, where all they knew for sure about my demographic profile is that I was still awake.

You tracked me everywhere I go, logging it forever, begging for someone to steal your database, desperately fearing that some new EU privacy regulation might destroy your business… for this?

Housing policy rant
All these new apartment buildings look the same! Why the hell is that? Part of it, it turns out, is that a combination of flame-retardant lumber and sprinkler systems make wood-frame midrise construction allowable in many building codes, and the financing works out in areas with moderate-to-high demand, and that’s why we have this particular shape of 3-5 story building with parking and/or retail on the ground floor.

Before you begin calling the 5-over-1 or 3-over-1 buildings “monstrosities,” note that they’re not. Here’s a Twitter threat touring some of the most beautiful ones around the world.

Or take it from the English, who have been dealing with 3-4 story buildings for quite some time:

Meanwhile, exlusionary zoning requiring only single-family homes is just segregation by another name.

Anyway, legalize apartments.

Data visualization

Jackson Pollock dataviz.
W.E.B. Dubois’ beautiful hand drawn charts about African-Americans, presented at the 1900 Paris Expo.

Zoom Zoom
A record number of Americans are more than 90 days behind on car payments.

“Predatory lending practices and a lack of real transportation options leave many households trapped in debt with few ways out,” said Faye Park, president of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, which advocates for consumer protections.

Meanwhile, CityLab asks us: As the planet warms, who gets to drive? Why do so many jobs require us to own cars?

Social Media Curation
Reminder: Batman is actually bad.
Sing along with “My Neck, My Back, We Tried This In Iraq…”

Cultivating Joy
Rough neighborhood: This crow has an ankle monitor and a knife.
Which is better? The tiny dog winning the agility championship? Or the slightly-larger dog just sort of chillaxing along the agility course?
Cat ladders!
This dude who just really enjoys growing prize-winning giant vegetables.
Pangolins. Just…. pangolins.
There is now an official archive of Prince gifs.