The boy is substantial. When people first meet Mio, they are often surprised by his heft. He carries it well, all 18 pounds of him. When he wants to, he can sprint and even jump surprisingly high, chasing after Janeway in a flurry of fur.
We stay out of the way when they get the zoomies.
... You can understand the two Trump presidencies as attempts to relive and re-enact the most atrocious moments in American history, as if the nation were led by toxic obsessives who relished the cruelty and criminality of the past and worshiped perpetrators as heroes — the supposedly hard men who built the country we know.
The president himself gestures toward this game of copycat when he hails Andrew Jackson or praises William McKinley as a man who made America great. And the administration itself seems to want to consciously emulate those moments of infamy and ignobility in the American past.
The administration’s hegemonic war in Venezuela and anti-Canadian saber rattling evoke the crudely imperial posture of the United States at the turn of the 20th century.
... Its use of ICE and Customs and Border Protection as a roving deportation force, aimed at anyone who looks suspect, is more than a little reminiscent of the federal bounty hunters deputized under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
It is also an echo of the first Red Scare, the Palmer raids and J. Edgar Hoover’s hunt for radicals during the Woodrow Wilson administration. ...
Bouie concludes:
[Trump's] vision of the future rests on a rotten nostalgia, and his plans for getting there were drawn from the wreckage of a shameful past.
Healthy, living countries look forward. MAGA poses the question: do we choose life?
• • •
... the White House recently released a 162-page report on the most critical issue facing voters: woke museum exhibitions. ... the most telling section of the White House report relates to its defense of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The report’s authors bristle at any suggestion that this famously racist law may have been motivated by any kind of racial animus. After all, such an acknowledgment might raise uncomfortable questions about the policies of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller—policies that are explicitly modeled on laws like this one.
... The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first major federal law to restrict immigration based on race or nationality. It banned nearly all Chinese laborers from coming to the United States for a decade; it also blocked Chinese immigrants who were already in the United States from ever becoming naturalized citizens. The premise was: If you were of Chinese descent, you were incapable of ever becoming an American, on account of your race.
The law was born of widespread anti-Chinese sentiment. It was passed amid a decade of growing repression and violence against Chinese immigrants in the Western United States, which resulted in massacres such as those in L.A.’s Chinatown (1871) and at Deep Creek in Oregon (1887), as well as many other acts of violence in the region before and after the bill was made law.
And then as now, economic precarity laid the predicate for virulent nativism. The late nineteenth century was a period of significant economic and technological upheaval owing to industrialization, job displacement, and the country’s evolving geographic footprint (including the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, which relied heavily on Chinese and Irish immigrant labor).
There's nothing new about MAGA's nativism. Unless we're from indigenous native ancestry, we all came to this continent from somewhere else. And, together, we make the country however great it may be and become.
Bishop Christopher Senyonjo has passed. Rest in peace.
He was that rare priest in the Anglican Church in Uganda who understood that LGBTQ folks were just yet more suffering humans, in need of knowing God's love. He was booted out, denied his pension, and harassed for his stand.
I had the privilege of spending several days with him at Seabury-Western Seminary in 2009.
His life and story taught many of us that there are so many people all over the world -- people we might never hear of -- doing what they think is right and what they understand Love to demand.
A missile strike does not end when the fire goes out. The pressure from the blast moves through doors, walls and the spaces body armor cannot protect. A service member may get back on his feet, answer a medic’s questions and return to work. On a Pentagon spreadsheet, that can look reassuring.
In the body, it may mean headaches, vertigo, trouble sleeping or memory problems that persist long after the uniform comes off. The military’s own medical experts warn that blast exposure can produce symptoms that are delayed, difficult to detect and potentially life-altering.
That distance—between what an injury looks like in a report and what it feels like to the person carrying it—is where the Trump administration has chosen to hide much of the cost [to American personnel] of its war with Iran.
Roughly 430 American service members have been injured since the war began on February 28. But in the week before an Iranian attack killed Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, and 1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, at a base in Jordan, Iran struck American forces in the country three other times. Those attacks injured dozens of troops and damaged several helicopters. ... After the latest deaths, Donald Trump wrote that Iran would “pay for that killing many times over.” Vengeance was announced before the administration explained what another round of escalation was supposed to accomplish. ...
Kinzinger knows the lessons of history that Trump doesn't know and would erase if he could. (Ever wondered what posturing pretty boy Pete serves his master for?)
A Pentagon that treats scrutiny as hostility will eventually lose the credibility it needs during a genuine emergency. That loss cannot be repaired by a patriotic video, an angry social-media post or a secretary declaring that casualties will stiffen American resolve. Credibility accumulates through disclosures that are often inconvenient to the people in charge. It disappears when every unwelcome fact is treated as aid to the enemy.
The Vietnam-era “credibility gap” did not begin with one spectacular lie. It widened as official optimism repeatedly failed to match what soldiers, reporters and eventually the public could see. Body counts became measures of progress. Internal doubts remained hidden while presidents and generals described success. ...
The deception can travel inward. When injuries are classified as minor, attacks go unmentioned and damaged aircraft vanish from public briefings, leaders may begin making decisions inside the same edited reality they have constructed for voters. A government that cannot admit what the enemy has done will have trouble judging what the enemy can still do.
Trump has made lying and incompetence central to his method of governance....
And Isabelles of this country die for Donald's deceptions.
• • •
Michael Tomasky makes some educated guesses about where this all is going.
The World’s Worst Nightmare: Donald Trump in Charge of a Real-Live War:
There are no best-case scenarios when a corrupt, vainglorious toddler is running the world’s deadliest military.
Read and weep ...
Watching the British transition to a new governing Labour Party prime minister from afar, I had what is probably a very obvious insight about this country which seems worth musing on.
First the disclaimer: I know very little about British politics and the broad stroke observations that follow may be inaccurate. I only dare write this because the actual subject is our, American, political follies -- and those I know plenty about.
Andy Burnham's takeover as Prime Minister makes him the seventh person in the top British job in the last ten years. And there is overwhelming agreement that his country is not serving its citizens as well as they wish it would. There's a housing crisis; there's a health care mess; international standing is precarious; racial tensions are unremitting; and "affordability" seems a mirage. The level of government turnover suggests the political landscape is both full of pratfalls and beset with confusion.
From across the pond, it seems obvious that the passionate, the successful exercise of popular sovereignty that was the the narrow 2016 vote to leave the European Union has been a sad wrong turn. Without Europe, Britain is poorer and weaker and the governments trying to manage national assertion within economic and intellectual isolation have been feckless failures. They can't satisfy anyone. The majority of Brits seem to think that Brexit was a mistake; and also they don't want to jump back into heated controversy over it. That hurt. There's a sharp age difference among the people:
It may also be, as one British pollster observed, that the 2016 majority for Brexit “has literally died out,” since the Leave camp at the time included a disproportionate number of elderly voters. And so the conversation in Britain is shifting to what can be done to reverse the damage ...
Sound familiar ... ?
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| There's flooding in Texas, there's strife in Iran ... Apologies to the Kingston Trio |
Like the Brits, when the American people shrug off our impulse to destroy government without building (I think largely we do this so as not to have to deal with brown people ...), reconstruction is going to be tough. You can't stop the clock and you certainly can't go backwards. When people experience Trump's grafting minions, his anti-science religious know-nothings, and the gloating of our domestic oligarchs, we don't like it. The reaction will and should be extreme.
I trust we'll take government back. The federal system and the country's vast wealth gives us a fighting chance to pull out of our Trumpist national nosedive into self-pity, perhaps more smoothly than the Brits. But what are we going to do with our chances?
The Mission District is full of houses which have been made canvasses for murals. On a recent walk, I encountered these:
... In the first Trump administration, opposition to the president’s immigration agenda was galvanized by the horrors of family separation. As Adam Serwer memorably noted back in 2018, “The cruelty is the point.”Today, the opposition is different, and the stakes seem far higher. It’s not separation that drives the fear; it’s disruption and death. There is deep mourning, but there is also a growing fury at these ICE killings all over Latino social media. It’s become clear that mass deportation comes with this type of violence—and maybe that’s by design.Under images of Araujo and Guerrero as departed angels, the page Latino and Muslim Unity wrote, “Our fathers deserve to come home to their families. We demand accountability.”
Carlos Espina, a social media influencer with 23 million followers across TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, posted videos at turns angry and heartbroken.
“The Colombian immigrant that was assassinated in a hail of bullets by ICE in Maine was in the car with his three-year-old baby,” Espina said in one. “It shows this agency has no type of respect for human life, much less the lives of our people. They see us as dogs, animals or worse.”
JC Frias, a Mexican-American activist with nearly 250,000 Instagram followers, shared the final words of both men: “Me estan matando” and “I tried to stop.”
“They were fathers. They were providers. They were loved. And they were HUNTED because of the color of their skin,” he wrote. In another post, Frias echoed a sentiment I’ve seen repeated often, including in private messages to me from Latinos and Mexican-Americans who saw their own father in Lorenzo Araujo.
“Lorenzo’s memorial says more than words ever could,” Frias wrote, describing the candles, Mexican flags, soccer jerseys, and families stopping to pray. “One message echoed over and over,” he said. “Lorenzo could have been any of our dads.” ...
Last month, I bought a new Apple iPad to use for travel. Since I bought the last one in the mid-2010s, I thought the $450 price pretty cheap for a very powerful tool. But I was also aware that the Erudite Partner had two weeks before bought the same iPad for notably less. What led to the price increase?
Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster: A shockingly inefficient trillion-dollar project
... The prices of some laptops have gone up as much as 50 percent, and low-cost computers are being hit the hardest. Affordable entry-level computers may “disappear by 2028” according to one forecast. And the memory shortage is expected to continue for years.
The memory is being put into data centers, which tech firms are expanding at incredible speed. They are planning to multiply total U.S.-data-center capacity by a factor of eight over the next few years. The demand for electricity at these sites is already so great that some companies are repurposing jet engines to power them. ...
He thinks the tech moguls who are building the AI future have blithely launched themselves into a morass.
... The problem with generative AI, in the industry’s own jargon, is that it does not scale. The cost of growing from, say, a thousand users to a million is a key factor that venture capitalists examine when they evaluate start-ups. They want to see that the cost of adding each new user decreases over time, so that the company can support millions of users and make increasing profits. ...
With generative AI, the work of building efficient, scalable systems has not been done. And the problem is exacerbated by the ever-larger generative-AI models, which have grown from 175 billion parameters in 2020 to more than 1 trillion today, according to independent estimates (the actual sizes of the models powering products such as Claude and ChatGPT are secret).
The large in large language model [LLM] should not be a selling point. But the industry’s observation that bigger models tend to outperform smaller ones has given rise to a totemic belief in “scaling laws” that suggest any problem can be solved by simply making models bigger.
Yet the returns are diminishing. The bigger an AI model is, the less it improves with each added parameter, and so it must be made bigger at a faster rate just to sustain steady progress. I asked a few AI researchers whether they could name any other real-world software that scales so poorly. None of them could think of any. ... By economic and engineering measures, generative AI might be the worst technology ever deployed.
But, Reisner concludes, the tech barons are enthralled by their messianic delusions.
Chatbot companies are aware that their products are inefficient. ... we seem stuck with LLMs, perhaps because they have been so aggressively marketed. They are now being added to everything, whether you want them or not. In 2024 and 2025, they were integrated into both Windows and MacOS, which means that more computing power is now needed to run a basic personal computer. Smartphones are also being sold with upgraded hardware as companies anticipate new AI features. Inefficient AI is also being added to common programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Word, meaning that computers need to be more powerful to run this software.
This is all especially bad because computers are no longer improving at the rate they used to. Since the 1950s, manufacturers have learned to make microchips steadily faster, smaller, and cheaper, a trend known colloquially as Moore’s Law. But in the past few years, components have gotten so small that manufacturers have run into molecular-level limitations on shrinking them any further, which has slowed progress significantly.
Ultimately, inefficiency may be of little concern to the people within the tech industry who believe that they are replicating intelligence itself. There is an almost-religious conviction among many in Silicon Valley that something mindlike could arise from LLMs, which are ultimately just statistical language-generating software—this, despite the software’s inability to recall basic facts, its lack of common sense, and its complete dissimilarity to a biological brain. ... But the mythological lure of AI is so strong that many engineers believe that nothing should stand in their way. Not even the basic task of writing efficient software.
Is Reisner correct that AI is powering toward a messy, expensive, debilitating dead end? I'm certainly not qualified to evaluate, but I'm glad to have read his case. You can do that yourself at this gift link.
What makes Reisner's case highly plausible to me is where it touches on an area in which I do think I have the capacity for discernment. (And you, the reader, likely do too.) In the US political arena, these tech boys act like intoxicated teenagers with unmerited riches to throw around. Nobody can directly gainsay them; with their kind of money, they are surrounded by supplicants, flatterers, and, of course, politicians eager for a piece. An experienced con man like the Orange Toddler may seem to them a mark, but he's the true professional swindler.
Scientific and business "geniuses" have lent themselves to fascist regimes in the past. The results were not to their liking; the Trial of the Industrialists at Nuremberg exposed cooperation with Nazi war crimes and mass murders. (Yes -- many escaped justice become "the West" decided they were useful to the Cold War... but that's another story.) Some of these guys are making themselves targets for a future fall.
On the other had, when they do attend to the agencies and offices they've been dropped into, they mostly serve only as wreckers. So maybe we should be glad that they view their roles primarily as extras on a stage set.
What's the Orange Toddler going to say in his national broadcast tonight? Looks like he wants to whine on about the 2020 election he lost -- and threaten the 2026 midterms which he is going to lose. I won't be watching; I've got something better to do.
Military historian Phillips P. O'Brien provides an apt and accurate description of what's going on:
The US-Iran War is a war of superlatives, because it is so absurd. It has already been the most “corrupt” war in US history (easily), the most “strategy-free” war in US history, and the most pointless war in US history. It might also be the stupidest. Another thing it is, without a doubt, is Donald Trump’s War (indeed that might be its name in history). This makes it a war with the stability of Donald Trump’s personality (i.e., very little). This week, for instance, the ceasefire between Iran and the USA completely broke down (yes, four days of constant bombardment means it has broken down) but if it instantly reasserted itself today, no one could be surprised because that is how Trump operates. ....
... The most recent polls are pretty consistent—somewhere between 60-66% of Americans do not support the war and consider it a failure. Only the GOP/MAGA base still supports this unending war (ironically enough). Also, the Iranian regime has consolidated its hold on power and seems to have rebuilt some of its military assets. However that is an irrelevance in Donald Trump’s War. He will do anything not to accept defeat for now.
... Look, Khamenei was a terrible guy, but the USA had pursued and legitimized a policy of leader assassination. Now it complains about this policy that has made Trump himself a legitimate target for Iran. What did he think? Did Trump believe he could assassinate whomever he wanted in Iran and Iran would not contemplate retaliating in kind?
The US believed for too long that it was living in a consequence free world, where it could do what it wanted and was so powerful that other states would simply bow to its magnificence, accept all insults, and grovel for its friendship. Well guess what? Actions have consequences, and the US has deliberately chosen policies with pretty terrible ones.Wake up and smell the roses America. You planted these ones.
Actually, I am not sure Donald Trump's War on Iran is the stupidest war in our history. I could make a case for what we call the "War of 1812" and what Europe, if it remembers it at all, thinks of as minor skirmish adjacent to the Napoleonic wars which shaped the modern era. The USofA got lucky in that one; the world powers were distracted by their own quarrels and couldn't follow up on the blows they'd dealt the Americans. (I'm an interested student of that one; one of its failures laid the basis for my family's subsequent well-being.)
Enil has friends. And so, when he had to report in to immigration court on Sansome Street in downtown San Francisco today, his posse showed up.
Enil is a loving father of three and longtime community member who was brought to the U.S. as a baby and has lived most of his life here.
He is an advocate for immigrants’ rights and has strengthened our community through his leadership and care. ICE is trying to detain him again and rip him away from his family.
The local legal community has done a valiant job of decoding and stymieing the multiple illegalities in the process. Immigration law is a snarled nightmare even in benign circumstances. The San Francisco Chronicle has produced a detailed, easy to understand account of how the San Francisco bar is working to protect migrants. Read it! [gift link]
Carnegie libraries were built with the ill-gotten gains of late 19th century industrialist/self-made robber baron Andrew Carnegie. He spent the last 20 years of his life on good works, funding 1,679 public libraries in the US, and more in Britain, Canada, and New Zealand. San Francisco has several, including a fine specimen in Chinatown.
When I see my neighbors who live on the street, I feel moved to repurpose these words of the great moral orator, Frederick Douglass:
… At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
As the city tries (and largely fails) to "clean up" other neighborhoods, people migrate. I'm not saying it's easy to intervene when we've allowed the creation of a whole class of under- or un-housed outcasts, but a decent society and polity would find a way.
I try to know as much history as I can study, but Kevin M. Levin has just taught me there's a lot I've missed about how the Union won the Civil War.
Roughly 75 percent of free born African American men of military age in the North volunteered to serve in the Union army during the Civil War. No other demographic group in American history has mobilized for war at anything close to that rate.
By Committee of Ladies of Philadelphia via Wikipedia These men enlisted knowing they would receive unequal pay until Congress relented in 1864, that they would serve under white officers and be denied commissions, and that capture might mean enslavement or execution rather than a prison camp. Finally, they served not knowing whether that service would translate into citizenship.
Roughly 180,000 Black men ultimately served in the United States Colored Troops, nearly a tenth of the Union army by the war’s end. They were joined by hundreds of thousands of enslaved men and women who fled to Union lines and forced emancipation onto the war’s agenda before Washington had decided what the war was about.
Frederick Douglass understood precisely what this service meant, which is why he threw himself into recruitment. “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S.,” he declared in 1863, “let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on the earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.”
Apparently civilians in Union cities knew who was defending them. I feel pretty certain that Donald Trump and his merry band of vandals who are busily trying to cover up what we should learn in US history doesn't know this. And they'd only work harder to push lies if they were taught it. But we can do better.
There are so many ways to reflect on America 250. I loved this one.
The Center for Asian American Media writes:
As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States of America, we’re looking through our Memories to Light archives of home movies from our community and are moved by how Asian Americans have long been an integral part of our nation.
Memories to Light is CAAM’s archive of Asian American home footage from across the country, spanning six decades (1920s through the 1980s). These images embody shared social, cultural, and political representations of Asian America and demonstrate the importance of collective storytelling as a path toward greater understanding of the Asian American experience.
What a gift!
Unlike most of the country, summer in San Francisco is cool and gray. Our cats, after being fed and loved by their human servants, take the mist to signal they should take naps.
Andrea Pitzer, author of a serious popular book on the history of concentration camps, surveys the literature on authoritarian governments and movements and comes up with a deceptively simple prescription for those of us who aren't agreeable to American fascism.
... If support for authoritarian rule can be influenced by something as simple as knowing that others support authoritarian rule, then it’s incumbent upon all of us who can to publicly reject strongmen and their tactics. This study shows that in communities with a free flow of information (as should be the case), the malleability of public opinion will remain a real risk. And this kind of peer influence on people supporting strongmen—when they realize others do—means that norms can shift radically for the worse in a short period, just as we’ve seen in the U.S. in recent decades.This runs deeper than Trumpism. And one way that each of us can push back is to let our peers know, though word and deed, that these abuses of power are against our values, and that the authoritarian response is a shameful one based in fear and weakness.
There are a million ways you can take on that challenge, publicly embracing freedom and openness to everyone in the community—through art, through writing, through community cleanup, through calls for accountability, through social get-togethers. The main thing is to do something to stake your claim and turn those who support authoritarian rule into the definite minority where you live and around the world.
My emphasis. We have neighbors and friends. They see what we care about and what we do. A pebble tossed in a lake or stream changes the movement of the water, even if imperceptibly at first. Keep tossing; there is no humane alternative.
It's hard to avoid thinking about "corruption" these days. Every pundit who isn't a MAGA stooge agrees that Donald Trump is the most corrupt leader/office holder the nation has ever empowered. Some might wonder whether Andrew Jackson, or Ulysses Grant, or even Warren G. Harding might give Trump a run for the title. But even a little digging says no. The barons of the Jim Crow system like Huey Long might give Trump competition, but their state level corruption is a different league. In the corruption games, Trump is a legitimate winner.
And yet discussions of Trump -- and his sons' and MAGA acolytes' -- corruption often bemuse me. Let me try to pick this apart ...
For about ten years back in the '70s and '80's I was a small scale construction contractor. That meant that jobs that I worked on were sometimes subject to inspection by the San Francisco Building Department. In that era, the inspectors were mostly old Irish guys who had worked the trades when younger; I think it is possible that my boss passed along a bottle of Irish whiskey to the inspector when we passed the final, but this was closer to solidarity than bribery. I don't think anyone thought you paid the inspector to get a sign off. These inspectors liked good work when they saw it: one of my happy memories of that era was having a white haired, retired, inspector, a Glen Park neighbor of the job, come over to where I was building an entry staircase and announce that I'd engineered the thing as well as any boy he'd trained. He cared that no one would stumble because of my errors. That was the ethos, at least most of the time.
In subsequent years, the San Francisco Building Department became a sinkhole of corruption facilitated by payoffs to "expediters" and sometimes allowing complete neglect of inspections, all for a price. It took a federal investigation to clean up some of this. I was glad I was out of the business.
That's what first comes to mind when I hear "corruption" -- bribes and payoffs to authorities for favors. And there certainly is plenty of that in Trump's various pay-to-play schemes.
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What we are up against isn't just run-of-the-mill bribery, quid pro quos. It's rot that lives and grows embedded in the system: the "moth and rust [that] doth corrupt," to be exploited by the thieves.
David Kurtz, via Henry Farrell, makes the point that we are up against this systemic meaning of "corruption."
"To understand corruption properly, we shouldn’t think of it as an individual level phenomenon. Classical thinkers, like Machiavelli, understood corruption as a condition that could afflict governments and indeed societies. But if we value democracy as the best way to order our affairs, we should understand corruption as not a moral phenomenon but a political one, which involves the corruption of democratic processes."
… and applies it to the Roberts Court:
"Across an apparently unrelated range of issues – campaign finance, executive immunity, political corruption and gerrymandering – the Roberts Court’s decisions have persistently corrupted the workings of democracy, so as to undermine equality in decision making and voice in favor of processes that are both duplicitous and exclusive."
Our Constitutional state has rotted from within at the encouragement and for the benefit of the rich and powerful. Such rot overrides citizen democracy. Yet citizen resistance remains and in our history has again and again overcome robber barons, against both sorts of corruption.
Note that this broader meaning of "corruption" was well understood in Shakespeare's English: Hamlet's friend, contemplating the drunken revels of the usurpers, summarizes: "there's something rotten" here.
We are forced to reclaim this usage.
Many thanks for all the kind birthday greetings yesterday. We celebrated by watching the lackluster performance by the US men's soccer team. Congrats to Belgium and all the worthy teams in the World Cup.
Of course the Orange Toddler had to do all he could to pollute the occasion. Heather Cox Richardson sums up his intervention in favor of a suspended US star player:
But a world in which playing fields are level is not the world Trump wants. He wants one in which people in power can ignore the rule of law for their own ends.
Most of us prefer just law, equal opportunity, and a "decent respect for the opinions of [human]kind."
This year I've come to delight in the idea of spending the couple of weeks stretching from Juneteenth through Independence Day as a season for reflection on the country, its history, its incomplete aspirations. I think that's a worthy practice.
Now back to the grind of freedom's constant struggle ...
San Francisco is surprisingly verdant. It's the dry season, yet the season of thick fog. Observed on neighborhood walks:
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