I never saw this 1950 Disney short called "Motor Mania" until yesterday. Assuming it was made by people in Southern California, it amazes me how clearly its point of view represents the person it calls Mr. Walker, rather than taking the side of Mr. Wheeler:
Though of course that's the whole point of the animation. It wouldn't have been made, otherwise.
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h/t to Brent Toderian on BlueSky.
A while ago, I noticed that Facebook sometimes showed me "garden"-related posts that looked like this:
They were intermittent, and mixed into a lot of other dross, so it took a while but at some point I realized they were generally coming from the same source, called Garden Decor Ideas. So I went to see what other great gardening ideas they had to offer.
You may not be surprised that the vast majority of their garden ideas involve a lot of white rocks, turf grass, hardscape, and not a lot of flowering plants that make any kind of a mess.
Looking at the neighboring roof lines and the limited sizes of the back yards, I believe this promoter must be in the UK. I don't know if this look is popular there, but it's not what I have in mind when I think of English gardens.
It's probably not news to anyone who owns a home or other type of building that insurance rates are going up, but it may be more startling that outright insurance denials are as well.
A few days ago, the New York Times covered this and created a nationwide map showing how the denials are concentrated, based on data from a U.S. Senate hearing:
As I assumed, the areas with the most denials were in obvious hurricane- and wildfire-prone areas, like the Southeast and California, but overall the denials were more widespread than I had realized.
What I also noticed was that two of the areas that had the least denials were the two places I have called home for the vast majority of my life: upstate New York and Minnesota. Pennsylvania has about the same level, it looks like, but other than that, nothing is close. (I'm not sure what the little overlaid dots in the coding mean, so am unclear what's going on in Alaska; I suspect it means no data are available.)
Upstate New York and Minnesota have been bandied about as "climate havens" for a while, so this doesn't totally surprise me, but their contrast with nearby states was startling, nonetheless. And I know that rates have been rising here, too, so maybe denials have only been lagging.
Climate change = climate crisis. It comes in forms we won't be ready for.
Since everyone is talking about Elon Musk more than ever the past couple of days — given his attempt to force a government shutdown, his endorsement of Germany's neo-Nazi party, and his general attempts to take over the U.S. government — I keep thinking about a thread I saw on BlueSky about 10 days ago.
I didn't know how much to credit it at the time, and I still don't. It's written by Seth Abramson, a name I know from Twitter but don't have a good handle on how authoritative he is.
Checking into him, the answer appears to be... sort of. He's a published, even best-selling author, and a University of New Hampshire professor. He was also a major Bernie bro in 2016. Some people consider him a conspiracy theorist, while others think he has written pieces that are ahead of the curve.
So with that caveat, here's his thread with a few things emphasized by me:
Over 2+ years of working on a biography of Elon Musk, I've learned that his ambitions are significantly grander than anyone realizes. He wants to be the first trillionaire ever. He wants to be the most famous human who ever lived. He wants to rule the world. He wants to live forever.
All literally.
To speak of what Elon Musk actually wants and intends to do almost makes one sound touched, as he's the first human to be in the position to achieve goals of this sort. For instance, it is estimated he will become the first trillionaire by 2029. His odds of being the most famous human ever are good.
He's positioned himself atop or near the top of the industries required to control geopolitics —robotics, AI, bioengineering, satellite communications, mass transport, international diplomacy, green energy — lacking only networked markets, which he seeks to enter with X as a so-called "everything app."
I see no coherent argument for him being anything but the most dangerous man in history. He's on drugs, doesn't experience empathy, and is a white supremacist, the richest man on Earth, media illiterate, a pathological liar, unscrupulous, a fraudster, and candidly (sans one subject) barely educated.
But none of that is what really makes him scary.
His sociopathy is at a different scale than we have ever seen before because he simply doesn't see himself as responsible to humankind as it exists today.
He is the most dangerous combination of two ideologies imaginable: a narcissist transhumanist.
This is another way of saying that he would allow the entirety of humanity to perish as long as he and his son X were able to survive. Nothing else matters. That's not sociopathy at a scale even our criminologists are trained to understand, as they are usually analyzing people without any resources.
He also believes there's a chance that if he works hard enough in certain industries he can become the first man to have his consciousness digitized and thereby become immortal.
Since in his view he's the most important person ever to live, there's no higher calling for him than becoming immortal.
I really don't care whether people accept what I'm saying as a Musk biographer. I learned from being a Trump biographer who was right about him from the beginning and who counterfactually is still told the opposite by people who understand the man not at all that expertise no longer really matters.
People will judge what I say about Musk the same way they judged what I said about Trump: whether it sounds plausible to them based on the limited information they have now and their own internal emotional atmospheres.
Which is kind of like saying we judge everything from.... our existing data set.
So when I write things I know to be true about Trump and Musk I do it for myself and because I know the facts, not because I believe in trying to persuade people to trust experts or follow facts. And if what an expert is saying sounds facially implausible because it's unprecedented, well... ballgame.
The only way to understand Musk is to understand that everything about him is unprecedented. His wealth is unprecedented. His ability to hide his white supremacy for many decades has been unprecedented. His ability to pass off the work of others or actual failures as his successes is unprecedented.
His ability to have so many beneficially untrue words written about him by biographers and media is unprecedented. It exceeds significantly that of Donald Trump. His ability to purchase an election and become a co-president when he is ineligible to serve is unprecedented.
All of this is wholly new.
I'd place his ability to escape consequences at the level of Donald Trump.
For instance, the conservative Wall Street Journal recently revealed that he has been lying for years about not having contact with Putin when in fact he's been having contact with him all along.
The story died instantly.
I can't believe that people who escaped being duped by Donald Trump, for instance Bernie Sanders, are now completely duped by Elon.
This underscores how unprecedented he is; he is duping even those people who escaped being consumed by the biggest scam and hoax of our times — that being Donald Trump.
I think people should be scared of him. I think people should be scared of what he's capable of and what he'll do. I think people should take nothing he says at face value and should instead simply marvel at how easily he crafts a cult of personality that has nothing to do with his real intentions.
He has it within his power to inflict a Second Great Depression on the US within the next 24 months — and if you think he wouldn't be surrounded by people telling him every second of the day that he was a hero for doing it and should under no circumstances stop the damage he was causing, you're wrong.
Elon does not course-correct. He shifts whatever facts he needs from non-existence into existence. He is effectively above the law now. He is a nation-state unto himself. And whether any of us like it or not, he is the President of the United States come January every bit as much as Donald Trump is.
So the way we should understand the situation we're about to enter into is this: what would happen if the U.S. were suddenly co-run by the two worst men in the history of the country, who also happened to be the two most dangerous men in the history of the country? Assume both men are above the law.
It doesn't matter to me if anyone who reads this accepts it. The facts support it. How it plays out can't be predicted; we'll all bear witness to it in real time over the next 30 years.
But anyone who wants to protect America should now see themselves in part as having to protect it from Elon Musk.
I speak here of American politicians, who should make it their business to oppose Elon Musk at every turn. I speak here of lawyers and judges, who should hound the man perpetually with lawsuits and judgments attempting to slow his ambitions.
I speak here of a culture that should utterly reject him.
I speak here of world leaders who should refuse to meet with him or do business with him or treat him as a diplomat. I speak here of consumers who should boycott his products. I speak here of journalists who must by now know he is the greatest threat to actual professional journalism in its history.
And please understand that we do already have data on his impact.
You can look up all the cities that have been lied to by the Boring Company. You can look up FSD deaths. You can see his destruction of the international public square Twitter used to be. Read up on the sick experiments at Neuralink.
Brave Ukrainian soldiers died because of the way Musk betrayed them in the skies over Crimea. Donald Trump is quite possibly President of the United States — and stands poised to destroy our democracy forever — because of an election Elon Musk helped buy him. Look at how he has hurt his kids and exes.
And for all that, people worship him.
No — I mean it. He is...worshipped.
No Musk biographer can now avoid dipping into Elongelicalism to see what it is all about.
And I am telling you that it is not about admiring the man, it is about worshipping him as a living savior.
The savior of our species.
America showed itself to be entirely inadequate to the task of contesting such a figure when it was just Trump. But from 2022 on, it wasn't just Trump seeking to turn America into an instrument for the venal, it was Musk and Trump. I fear the toll they will enact on us will be more than we can bear.
Note that everything I write about here is discussed in publicly available sources. You simply have to read hundreds and hundreds of them to get past the hagiographies and fantastically credulous reports that gum up the works of doing research into what the man actually intends and who he really is.
Another example of Musk and one of his companies breaking the rules (is that "the law"?) just came out today:
Elon Musk and SpaceX have repeatedly failed to comply with federal reporting protocols aimed at protecting state secrets... Concerns about the reporting practices — and particularly about Musk — have triggered at least three federal reviews… New York Times: Elon Musk and SpaceX Face Federal Reviews After Violations of Security Reporting Rules
Failing to protect state secrets! Seems like the penalties for breaking those rules should be pretty heavy, and not something to be rewarded by putting you in charge of the government.
I've long wondered why any of the billionaires wouldn't want to try to create a habitable planet, since they have to live here, too. Maybe they think they can get to an island or a bunker somewhere. But if Musk, the ultimate billionaire, if not trillionaire, thinks he's the only one who matters and he can transcend... his behavior makes a lot more sense.
By the way, in terms of wealth, keep this in mind:
$100K saved for retirement is a 4.3" stack of $100 bills.
$1M: 43" [a bit less than four feet]
$1B: 3,600 feet. 12 football fields. World's tallest building is 2,722 feet.
Musk: $486B. 330 miles high. 60 Mt. Everests, stacked.
—Steve Roth on BlueSky
Still not doing super great, so I thought I'd take today off like I did about 10 days ago.
How about that Elon Musk, though? You can't make this stuff up.
After Luigi Mangione (allegedly) killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, I wondered what Cory Doctorow thought of it, and whether he would write something about it. That's because he published a story called "Radicalized" several years ago, which was essentially about the concept of pissed off men whose family members had cancer, killing insurance company executives.
Today, I found out that Doctorow posted those thoughts more than a week ago.
A couple of quotes:
I don't want people to kill insurance executives, and I don't want insurance executives to kill people. But I am unsurprised that this happened. Indeed, I'm surprised that it took so long. It should not be controversial to note that if you run an institution that makes people furious, they will eventually become furious with you. This is the entire pitch of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century: that wealth concentration leads to corruption, which is destabilizing, and in the long run it's cheaper to run a fair society than it is to pay for the guards you'll need to keep the guillotines off your lawn.
But we've spent the past 40 years running in the other direction, maximizing monopolies, inequality and corruption, and gaslighting the public when they insist that this is monstrous and unfair.
And:
Murder is never the answer. Murder is not a healthy response to corruption. But it is healthy for people to fear that if they kill people for greed, they will be unsafe.
You can read his short story "Radicalized" here.
In preparing for yesterday's anniversary post, I found my school vaccination card along with my report card.
Here's what I received through the school system, or they had records of from my mother if a vaccine was administered at a younger age.
Thank you, public health and school nurses:
I had measles, so no vaccine is recorded for that.
It was 17 years ago that I started this shindig. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
As she turned 17 that fall, the real DN3 was just starting her senior year in high school. She had recently completed drivers' ed, but she didn't get her license until the summer after graduation. She spent fall of that year dividing her time between her small-town high school and taking classes at large public university about 20 miles away. (I've written about that here.)
But after fall semester, I had a light load, which was devoted to turning out a required term paper in English plus another one just for the heck of it, taking first-year Latin on a lark, cofounding and editing a student newspaper, and doing a bunch of other extracurricular activities: French Club, drama club, band and chorus, yearbook, and probably some other things I've forgotten.
I protest-failed gym class for one half-quarter because the teacher required us to perform gymnastics up to a certain standard. This seemed physically unfair to me, and on top of that it was absurd and incoherent to require study hall as punishment to make up for a physical deficit. But I served my five weeks in study hall, nonetheless.
I took the SAT exam early in fall, with scores that fed into confirming the National Merit scholarship I was awarded, based on my junior-year PSAT scores. The funding came from IBM, which almost always provided scholarships for children of their employees who met the National Merit criteria.
My report card shows 0 half-days absent for the first three quarters, but then 8 in the last quarter. Was that senioritis, or was I sick? I don't remember. As on previous report cards, the carbon for the earlier quarters has faded almost to unreadability. There's a class listed for the third and fourth quarters whose name I can't read and I have no recollection of, but I averaged 93% in it... whatever it was.
The school year 1976–77 saw the last few months of the 1976 presidential election — won by Jimmy Carter in November. China's Cultural Revolution ended with the capture of the Gang of Four, and Mao's death in September. By summer 1977, Deng Xiaoping rose to power. Some other notable news events: New Jersey legalized gambling in Atlantic City, the cause of Legionnaire's Disease was identified, the Space Shuttle was in test flights, Spain held its first democratic elections in 41 years, Elvis Presley died (August 1977), and French was made the official language of Quebec.
Here's to another year past, and to the next one ahead.
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My past anniversary posts, each with an age-appropriate photograph:
For as long as I've been paying attention to plants in Minnesota, I've thought the white pine had always been the most prevalent tree in the arboreal forest that covers the northern part of the state. Today I learned from a story in the Star Tribune that the tamarack (Larix laricina) originally held that position:
Before European settlement, tamaracks were the most common tree in Minnesota, spreading across some 6 million acres. Their pencil-straight trunks made them ideal for railroad ties and telephone poles and they were quickly logged out of the uplands that cover most of the state, and never grew back. They survived in the lowland swamps and peatlands, where most other tree species cannot survive and logging is much more difficult and can happen only when the ground is frozen.
Tamaracks are conifers, but they're not evergreens. They turn yellow in fall and lose their needles.
Now, tamaracks are threatened by climate change. Our warmed winters are allowing the eastern larch beetle to get in more reproductive cycles each year, so the trees — which have coexisted with the beetles for millennia — are no longer able to recover.
Before [the early 2000s], there were about 1.4 million acres of tamaracks in the state. The beetles have partially or completely devoured about 1.1 million of those acres.
Before reading the story, I knew about the larch beetles and the role of climate change in their effect on the tamaracks, but I had no idea that "we" (my European American progenitors in Minnesota) had done so much to destroy the tamaracks earlier, and that the only reason there are any left for the beetles was because the trees were located in areas too hard to log.
It's underplayed within the length of the full story, as if the logging was natural. But it stands out as a second — numerically more important — assault on the trees. And now human-created warming has caused this second wave of tree loss, which will send the southern edge of the tamarack's range further and further north.
I have no idea how many times I've mentioned Cory Doctorow or Dave Roberts on here, but they've never been mentioned together before. That changes today, because Doctorow was recently a guest on Roberts's Volts podcast.
I wrote down one quote from Doctorow that I thought exemplifies his attitude about the tech world's efforts to drain us all of money and wall us in:
[Phone a]pps are a locus of enshittification.... An app is just a website wrapped in enough [intellectual property] that it's a felony to modify it so it works for you and not the manufacturer.
Plus lots of info monopolies you may not know about, right-to-repair, the definition of a "Ulysses pact," bits about Robert Bork you may have forgotten or never known, and the best pitch for switching to Linux/Ubuntu I've let myself hear (lalala I'm still not really listening, she says as she types into her Mac OS).
One last thing to share from their talk: we all know that inkjet printers are a scam to sell expensive ink, but I appreciated his unusual way of putting it. Hewlett Packard ink, which Doctorow says is currently priced around $10,000 per gallon, is the same as what you'd pay for the semen of a Kentucky-Derby–winning race horse.
They end by talking about why Doctorow has not yet joined BlueSky, and what it will take for him to join. He doesn't need one more online place to be trapped in, essentially. So he's waiting for the platform to make some changes they have promised that will make it truly federated.
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2019 photo by Dominik Butzmann, CC BY-SA 2.0
These appeared two days in a row, but in history occurred about five years apart.
U.S. Army Executes 13 Black Soldiers in Houston, Texas: On December 11, 1917 "the U.S. Army executed 13 Black soldiers who had been previously court-martialed and denied any right to appeal." That was the beginning of the killing and life sentences for soldiers who had confronted racist police from Houston. The Black soldiers were assigned in July to guard white soldiers deploying to Europe out of Camp Logan, and had been constantly harassed and sometimes beaten by the police. When they marched in protest in late August, they were attacked by an armed white mob. "In the ensuing violence, four soldiers, four policemen, and 12 civilians were killed." The only ones held responsible were the Black soldiers, 63 of whom were court-martialed. 54 were convicted: 43 to life in prison, and 13 to death with no appeal. Two more trials resulted in 16 more death sentences, but they were allowed appeals and Woodrow Wilson commuted 10 of them; 6 of the men hanged. Work by the NAACP got most of the other 50 early release. "No white civilians were ever brought to trial for involvement in the violence."
White Mob Lynches Arthur Young in Taylor County, Florida: December 12, 1922, was the culmination of a racist manhunt and series of killings, following the murder of a white woman on December 2. There was no plausible evidence that a Black man was involved in the killing —in fact the opposite — but a suspect was fabricated. One Black man (unnamed in the EJI story) was killed first during the search. The suspect, Charles Wright, was captured and burned alive on December 8, and then for no reason I could discern, his friend Arthur Young was arrested on December 12. While the cops were moving Young to the jail, a lynch mob seized him, shot him multiple times, and hung him from a tree. They then burned a number of homes and civic buildings in the Black community of Perry, terrorizing the people there and driving dozens to leave permanently. "No one was ever held accountable for the lynchings of Arthur Young and Charles Wright. They are among 15 documented African American victims of racial terror lynching killed in Taylor County, Florida, between 1877 and 1950."
For every story EJI shares in their daily posts, remember that many powerful and monied forces in this country want to make sure that no one, but especially young people, learn about these truths of our country's history, let alone the greater existence of white supremacy that underpins them.
It's possible to get their daily calendar entries sent as an email by signing up here.
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Here are two of my past posts about EJI:
Bryan Stevenson: Just Mercy, November 2014
The Gnadenhutten Massacre, April 2024
A vine's only weakness is its weakness. It desperately wants to grow as tall as a tree but it doesn't have the stiffness necessary to do it politely. A vine finds its way to the sun using not wood, but pure grit and undiluted gall....
Vines are not sinister; they are just hopelessly ambitious. They are the hardest working plants on Earth. A vine can grow an entire footing length on just one sunny day. Within their stems gush the highest rates of water transfer ever measured in a plant (pages 126–127).
From the epilogue:
Human civilization has reduced the plant, a four-hundred-million-year-old life form, into three things: food, medicine, and wood. In our relentless and ever-intensifying obsession with obtaining higher volume, potency, and variety of these three things, we have devastated plant ecology to an extent that millions of years of natural disaster could not (page 279).
Overall, I liked Lab Girl well enough and can recommend it. At the same time, I'm looking to The Story of More for a more focused narrative, still with great morsels from Jahren's research and years of experience.
