reading: Bad News by Batya Ungar-Sargon 📚
This woman is not smart.
The book has a decent premise, but my goodness, her conclusions are downright incoherent.
Watching ‘Andor’ Is No Substitute for Actual Resistance
I worry that for many people the consumption of this television show feels pacifying, as if watching it is a replacement for joining a protest, their fandom for the rebel alliance a stand-in for their politics in the real world. Disney wants to provide every product to you, even the language of your rebellion against Disney. What’s the point of feeling affirmed if the ultimate goal of Disney is to get you to spend more money on its brands?
I feel the same about the effects of social media on the general population. People take to Facebook or X or Bluesky and feel like they're doing something by commenting, liking, or retweeting.
But of course they're not. They're still glued to their phone, tricked into feeling like they're making a difference.
One of my favorite Prince songs, and one of his most prescient.
It slaps.
Nikka Costa & Prince - Push & Pull
My two favorites, together.
‘He Took My Girl’: Your Memories Of The Artist Forever Known As Prince
“August 14th, 2004: MCI Center in Washington DC. It was the Prince Musicology Tour. I went with my wife (then girlfriend) and her sister. They both had specially made t-shirts with Prince’s face airbrushed on them. I thought they were nuts. We were seated on the floor in the second row from the front. We were then treated to what became THEE greatest concert I’ve ever seen. A little over halfway through the show, I think it was ‘U Got the Look,’ Prince starts to point out a handful of ladies in the crowd to get on stage and dance with him. Then…. .in SLOW MOTION… he turns our way…. with both index fingers, he points out my wife and her sister. I said to myself, ‘it’s been a wonderful 2 years with this woman, but i’ll never see here again.’ It was those DUMB SHIRTS. ONLY through the grace of God, she came back. I can always say that for a few short minutes, Prince took my girl….. with PRIDE.” – Robert Carter
I was a late bloomer. The DJ at my junior prom played Kiss while I was on the dance floor and it stopped me dead in my tracks. What was this? At that time, I was listening to Cat Power and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Modest Mouse and the White Stripes, none of whom sounded like this.
I spent the next year listening to Prince (and Al Green) incessantly. I’d go for long walks in the woods with my portable CD player tucked into the back pocket of my Dickies, the headphone cord running under my shirt.
I was gay, but not out, and here was a man singing in a way that made me feel like my sexuality both mattered and mattered not at all. The way his voice shifted between Prince and Camille, his music from guitar to falsetto… it was a revelation.
Along with Nikka Costa’s Everybody Got Their Something, Prince’s Musicology changed the trajectory of my life. I would not be who I am today without those two — I can’t imagine my life without those albums, without them.
Prince died nine years ago today.
Israel’s Military Cites ‘Professional Failures’ in Killings of Gaza Medics
Military officials had initially asserted, repeatedly and erroneously, that the vehicles were “advancing suspiciously” toward the troops “without headlights or emergency signals.”
The military backtracked on that assertion a day after The New York Times published a video, discovered on the cellphone of one of the dead paramedics, that showed the clearly marked vehicles flashing their lights and coming to a halt before the attack.
Israeli soldiers later buried most of the bodies in a mass grave, crushed the ambulances, fire truck and a U.N. vehicle, and buried those as well.
In the statement on Sunday, the Israeli military said that “removing the bodies was reasonable under the circumstances, but the decision to crush the vehicles was wrong.”
Emphasis mine.
DOGE is reportedly building a ‘master database’ of government information
In a letter to the Social Security Administration’s Inspector General’s office requesting an investigation into DOGE, Ranking Member Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-VA) alleged that the government entity created by Elon Musk supposedly to reduce the size of the federal government is now constructing a “cross-agency master database” of sensitive personal information.
Wired appeared to back up Connolly’s allegations on Friday, detailing an effort at DOGE to fold this database into the Department of Homeland Security, the counterterrorism agency founded after 9/11. Specifically, “mass amounts” of personal data harvested from the IRS, SSA, and voting records in Pennsylvania and Florida were recently uploaded into servers at the United States Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS), which processes immigration cases.
In politics, as with everything, a movement, moment, or event can be studied and understood in isolation, or it can be seen as a reaction to a previous action.
The amassing of private, personal data can be understood as an event unto itself, or it can be understood as a reaction to something else.
I believe this, and the last presidential election as a whole, is a reaction to the Democrat’s woeful inability to acknowledge immigration as an issue of importance to the American people, and thus I largely blame them for this mess of a situation we find ourselves in.
There are two kinds of political parties: those that take accountability for their own actions, and those that merely blame their opponents. The Republicans have long been the latter, and I thought the Democratic Party would eventually position itself as the antidote to them.
But over the last decade, this began to feel unlikely, and now it feels downright impossible. Democrats seem to have learned all the wrong lessons from Trump. In response to him, they became more like him, deflecting accountability rather than accepting responsibility for the mistakes they’ve made.
Democrats or Republicans, it now makes no difference. We are being governed by children.
That should be scary enough, but it’s made terrifying when one of those parties has autocratic aspirations.
Cops can’t do cell tower mass surveillance ‘dumps,’ court rules
A federal judge in Nevada has ruled that it’s unconstitutional to obtain swaths of cellular records through “tower dumps” — but will still let police get away with using it as evidence, as reported earlier by 404 Media and Court Watch.
With tower dumps, authorities can dig through the cell records that pinged off a particular tower during a specific time. Though police may be looking for just one record, these dumps often expose the data of thousands of people, making it a major privacy concern. In a 2010 case involving the High Country Bandits, for example, officers caught the two bank robbers by looking through a tower dump containing more than 150,000 phone numbers.
Trump Halts Data Collection on Drug Use, Maternal Mortality, Climate Change, More
Every year, year after year, workers in agencies that many of us have never heard of have been amassing the statistics that undergird decision-making at all levels of government and inform the judgments of business leaders, school administrators and medical providers nationwide.
The survival of that data is now in doubt, as a result of the Department of Government Efficiency’s comprehensive assault on the federal bureaucracy.
Reaction to those cuts has focused understandably on the hundreds of thousands of civil servants who have lost their jobs or are on the verge of doing so and the harm that millions of people could suffer as a result of the shuttering of aid programs. Overlooked amid the turmoil is the fact that many of DOGE’s cuts have been targeted at a very specific aspect of the federal government: its collection and sharing of data. In agency after agency, the government is losing its capacity to measure how American society is functioning, making it much harder for elected officials or others to gauge the nature and scale of the problems we are facing and the effectiveness of solutions being deployed against them.
Niall Ferguson: The Trade War and the Battle for the 21st Century
Bari Weiss: So what is your message, Niall, to someone living in a deindustrialized, hollowed-out town in the Rust Belt, who looks at the history, economically speaking, of the past 30 years and thinks, “this didn’t work for me and I need something to work for me.” What is the message to those people? If the message is not ‘manufacturing is coming back,’ and you’re saying that’s a nostalgia trip, what is the message?
Niall Ferguson: Well, it’s the same message you would have given people in agriculture who were making similar lamentations in the 1920s, when American agriculture started to encounter very severe competition. The message is: I’m really sorry, economic history hasn’t been on your side, but you’re still getting a better deal than the people who died in the trenches in World War I, or who were mown down in the battlefields of Europe in World War II. Economic history is kinder than military and geopolitical history can be. You cannot turn the economic historical clock back. It’s as realistic to imagine America being an industrial superpower again as to imagine that Britain could rebuild the British Empire by an act of political will. So one has to accept that.
Emphasis mine.
I’ve long respected Bill Maher. This only strengthens that respect.
John Oliver is (Still) Part of the Problem
...at some point, when you see liberals share the same videos week after week of an annoying British man sneering down a camera lens to tell you how stupid everyone else is, you do have to ask if the American left-of-center has any sense at all of how much their project has been damaged by their reputation for patronizing self-righteousness. If the Trump era has proven anything, it’s just how wildly sensitive voters are to the perception that someone somewhere is judging them. That level of sensitivity to vague slights is stupid and the grievance usually disingenuous, but that’s politics, baby. And Oliver is such a pitch-perfect caricature of progressive self-regard - snarky, aloof, judgmental, incurious - that I sometimes wonder if his show is a brilliant op pulled off by the Heritage Foundation.
Core to the liberal ethos has always been the embrace of being reasonable, in a perfectly vague but committed sense, and for a long time that included dismissing concerns for the rights of genuinely small gender identity minorities as “going too far.” Now, thanks to the way post-Obama era left-of-center politics played out, conventional liberal Democrats are generally strong supporters of trans rights, which represents real progress. Unfortunately, as part of this embrace they’ve sucked trans rights discourse into their usual shtick: acting as though all decent people already agree with them and thus disdaining the notion that they need to convince anyone of anything.
...I think Donald Trump’s incredible success, despite his obvious mental enfeeblement, proves that “You think you’re better than me?!” is the single most powerful force in contemporary American political life. Given that this is true, I simply see zero positive utility in the public persona of someone like John Oliver, whose popularity is built on the degree to which he telegraphs the lazy superiority and righteous contempt that so many voters see in liberals. At some point, we have to acknowledge that there’s a reason it’s so hard to fight the perception that liberals are incurious and arrogant scolds, looking down their noses at the rest of us: because so often, that perception is true.
I’m a Soybean Farmer Who Voted for Trump. I’m Begging the President to End the Trade War.
The U.S. became the leader in soybean production about 30 years ago. That’s when China started buying our soybeans as it went through its own industrial transformation, making its people wealthier. With more money to spend, the demand for meat exploded—and so did the need to feed soybeans to poultry, cattle, and pigs in China. To this day, they still use 70 percent of their soybean imports to feed livestock.
Some say we should aim to sell all our soybeans domestically. But to do that, we would need to double the markets that we currently have in the U.S. That’s just not going to happen at the snap of a finger. It would mean doubling the U.S. consumption of pork, poultry, and beef as well as biofuel production.
As a businessman, President Trump must know how urgent this is. The current trade war with China is a gamble with American livelihoods, especially for farmers—those of us who grew up with soil and sweat—who can’t imagine doing anything else.
Mr. President, I hope you hear our plea: Please make a deal with China now.
If the Democrats want the coal miners to code, maybe the Republicans want the farmers to mine?
Truly the work of a Very Stable Genius™.
reading: It’s Not the End of the Earth, But You Can See It from Here by Roger Welsch 📚
“On America’s rural landscape associating only with those in your own image would be difficult because chances are you are one of a kind where there are so few images to begin with.”
The United States has gone rogue. There must be consequences.
Even if the United States rescinds its tariffs and ends its trade war, it has already shown it’s a rogue state that cannot be trusted. It’s lashing out at its allies, reneging on its obligations to international institutions like the World Health Organization, not to mention the Ukrainian people, and there’s no guarantee that will change in four or eight years. The United States has spent the past century meddling in countries around the world, overthrowing their governments, financing forces that served its own interests, and enforcing punitive measures like it has on Cuba for sixty years.
That should have never been acceptable. But now, as it starts throwing its closest friends under the bus, it’s long past time to embrace — and even hasten — the end of American hegemony and the horrors it’s brought on the world. If countries that have long claimed to believe in an international rules-based order truly believe in human rights and international law, it’s time for them to break with the United States, reject their ongoing subordination to its tech dominance, find new friends and allies, and build a better tech infrastructure that enables a better world for everyone.
This is what “America First” looks like from the outside.
Trump’s Last-Minute U-Turn on Tariffs Left Advisers in the Dark
At 9:37 a.m. Wednesday, the president was still bullish on his policy, posting on Truth Social: “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!”
But in the end, it was the markets that got him to reverse course.
The economic turmoil, particularly a rapid rise in government bond yields, caused Mr. Trump to blink on Wednesday afternoon and pause his “reciprocal” tariffs for most countries for the next 90 days, according to four people with direct knowledge of the president’s decision.
Will Trumpets ever admit their boy doesn’t know what he’s doing?
Of course not. But it’s just so much fun to watch them contort themselves in his defense.
Seriously, they should win some kind of award for the mental gymnastics they put themselves through. 🎖️
iPhone factories unlikely in US despite Trump’s opinion
Beyond the cost implications for Apple, domestically manufacturing iPhones would likely lead to substantial price increases for stateside buyers. It’s either the tariffs or the domestic manufacturing costs; pick one. American citizens don’t, by and large for now, want to work for peanuts in factories, with all the surrounding pollution, and the factories would need to be built, too, all of which costs money. Cheap foreigners could be drafted in, yet the current White House regime is happily fostering a heightened hostile environment for migrants. Automation could be maximized, which means fewer jobs are created and requires specialists and research.
Manufacturers could absorb these costs, and reduce their profit margins, and upset investors and retirement portfolios. There are ways forward, with various pros and cons; it’s just nowhere near as trivial as the Trump administration is portraying it. Tariffs are a rather blunt approach to what needs coordination between private and public sectors, long-term training and investment, and political nous.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives estimated this week that a Chinese-made iPhone currently priced at $1,000 could balloon to $3,500 if manufactured in the US. Meanwhile, an April 3 analysis from Rosenblatt Securities warned that tariffs alone could drive the price of the iPhone 16 Pro Max 1TB — currently $1,599 — up to nearly $2,300. And that’s before the US-China trade war escalation went into warp.
Our uneducated populace is to blame for much of this mess. We Americans do not understand economics. We don’t know the difference between price and cost, we simply want to work less (yet for more money) so that we can buy ever-more inexpensive things.
That’s not possible without the very consequences we seem to be angry about.
How to fix it? I don’t know. I get the distinct feeling that it’s somewhat inevitable if American citizens aren’t willing to adjust their expectations. (Not something we’re known for.)
White House Asks Supreme Court to Block Order to Return Man Wrongly Deported to El Salvador
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday to block a trial judge’s order directing the United States to return a Salvadoran migrant it had inadvertently deported.
Judge Paula Xinis of the Federal District Court in Maryland had said the administration committed a “grievous error” that “shocks the conscience” by sending the migrant, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, to a notorious prison last month. She ordered the government to return him by 11:59 p.m. on Monday.
In the administration’s emergency application, D. John Sauer, the U.S. solicitor general, said Judge Xinis had exceeded her authority by engaging in “district-court diplomacy,” because it would require working with the government of El Salvador to secure his release.
All Americans, citizen or not, should be outraged by this.
Chatoyant.
‘Liberation Day’ Was Even Worse Than Expected
Like a game show host, Trump announced a series of tariff rates on many of America’s major trading partners.
How did he come up with the rates?
It seems by a crude formula: A given nation’s trade deficit with the U.S. divided by that nation’s exports to the U.S.
Trump calls these “reciprocal tariffs,” and the claim is that we are taxing foreign nations at only half the rate they are taxing our imports. The numbers are illusory, however, some of them apparently made up (Brazil at only ten percent?) and others counting a VAT as a net tax on American imports, which it is not.
What timeline are we living in?
This is perhaps the worst economic own goal I have seen in my lifetime. I cannot think of any credentialed economist colleague—Democrat, Republican, or independent—who would endorse it. And I haven’t even mentioned the risk that some foreign nations will retaliate against American exporters, damaging our economy all the more.
The last two months have felt like all the chickens of the last 40 years have come home to roost. Since I became politically aware, I’ve had the lingering suspicion that we would be the ones to bring about our own decline, all because we prioritize money above all else. Americans wanted cheap stuff so badly that we outsourced our own jobs to other countries. Think about that.
Plainly, China is ascendent and America will not be great again. The country of my grandparents’ mythologizing — the country I want to believe in — is gone.
Trump’s Secret Police Are Now Disappearing Students For Their Op-Eds
For years, we’ve been hearing breathless warnings about a “campus free speech crisis” from self-proclaimed free speech warriors. Their evidence? College students doing what college students have done for generations: protesting speakers they disagree with, challenging institutional policies, and yes, sometimes attempting to create heckler’s vetoes.
This kind of campus activism — while occasionally messy and uncomfortable — has been a feature of American higher education since the 1960s. It’s how young people learn to engage with ideas and exercise their own speech rights. Sometimes that activism is silly and sometimes it’s righteous. Often it’s somewhere in between, but it’s kind of a part of being a college student, and learning what you believe in.
But now we face an actual free speech crisis on campus that goes beyond just speech. It’s an attack on personal freedoms, due process, and liberty. The federal government isn’t just pressuring universities over speech — it’s literally disappearing students for their political expression. If you support actual free speech, now is the time to speak up.
The latest example of this authoritarian overreach is particularly chilling: Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts who was here legally on a student visa, was abducted by masked agents in broad daylight. She was disappeared without due process or explanation — only later did we learn she had been renditioned to a detention center in Louisiana.
Her supposed crime? A year ago, she co-authored an op-ed in The Tufts Daily criticizing her university administration’s stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Not advocating violence. Not supporting terrorism. Not even criticizing the U.S. government. Just exercising core First Amendment rights by publishing criticism of her own university’s policies in a student newspaper.
When does America cross the Rubicon?
When is this country no longer a democracy?
When does it become something else?
I’ve been asking these questions of people for a few months now, and there’s no consensus answer. When a president runs for a third term? When an administration ignores the rulings of the Supreme Court? (Trumpets will say Biden already did this.) When the president jails people, citizens or not, that oppose him, First Amendment be damned?
The research for State of Surveillance showed that you can’t drive anywhere without going through a town, city or county that’s using public surveillance of some kind, mostly license plate reading cameras. I wondered how often I might be captured on camera just driving around to meet my reporters. Would the data over time display patterns that would make my behavior predictable to anyone looking at it?
So I took a daylong drive across Cardinal Country and asked 15 law enforcement agencies, using Freedom of Information Act requests, to provide me with the Flock LPR footage of my vehicle. My journey took me over 300 miles through slices of the communities those agencies serve, including the nearly 50 cameras they employ.
reading: Bad News by Batya Ungar-Sargon 📚
Racism is still a blight on American life. But wokeness is not how we heal; it has simply redefined the problem to the benefit of educated elites. By focusing on immutable characteristics like race, the woke moral panic has allowed economic elites to evade responsibility for their regressive view that elites should not only exist but rule. And in presenting race rather than class and income as America’s deep and worsening divide, the purveyors of wokeness have ended up comforting white, liberal elites, even as they have called them white supremacists.
It pains me to agree with her because I really dislike her appearances on Real Time, but I bought this book to learn about opinions I don’t necessarily agree with.
A press that is so solidly on the side of that powerful few, so solidly of it, that afflicts the afflicted and comforts the comfort-able, will hasten our demise. And that should terrify us all.
She loses me here. The press, or at least every journalist I know, is not on the side of the elite.
They’re noble, fiercely curious people who insist on interrogating the powerful.
But that’s not to say they didn’t lose the plot in the last decade. I think a lot of journalists, because they’re largely all from an educated class, were imbued with certain ideals. Ideals that, as a gay man, benefit me personally.
But perhaps those ideals didn’t reflect those of the larger populace.
That’s a tough thing to realize. I am of the generation of journalists that grew up in this era, and I want to believe that what I knew was good and just and true.
But I can’t continue to live in a world that’s so painfully incongruent with this one I’m currently living in.
In other words, I was wrong.
There’s a lifetime of heartbreak in that admission.
But there’s hope, too.
If you can tell an adult’s politics by their haircut, cross the street.
Save yourself the time and trouble.