I noted recently that I cancelled my Washington Post subscription, in an attempt to punish Bezos for sucking up to Trump, including by a noticeable increase in "well, maybe Trump isn't all that bad" columns in the paper.
I knew that this would likely prompt "please come back, at a discount price!" offers, but I wasn't quite prepared for how low they would eventually go.
This low: 99 cents (Australian) a month for a year, then increasing to $9 a month. Cancel anytime.
Well, significantly decreasing the amount of money I'm paying to next to nothing might be punishment enough for now. I re-subscribed...
Seems like I should try the same exercise at the NYT now!
As I have grown older, I keep having the odd combination of thinking that World War 2 now seems a long time ago; but also that anything that happened less than 100 years in the past is not so far away from now, really. *
I'm sure it's a result of the combination of formerly knowing many people, including my parents, who were in the war but have passed away quite a few years ago, while also feeling that anything that has happened within a life span that I might achieve isn't that far in the past.
Anyway, this is just by way of preamble that I was a little surprised to realise that today is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and later this year it will be same anniversary of the end of the war. (I had this thought about the end of the war last year, and now here it is, upon us.)
It adds some..complexity?...to the feelings about the situation in Israel/Gaza now, too.
* And in the bigger picture - my "meta" take on the current unsettled state of the world is that it's due to the revolution in self understanding that came with Darwinian evolution, Einstein and the realisation of the incredible age and size of the universe all happening only a "short" time ago - barely 150 years - which is not enough time for cultures to come to grips with it.
I'm referring, only partly ironically, to all of the tech world turmoil that the Chinese AI company DeepSeek has caused in the last week. This Newsweek article summarises it well, I think.
It does strike me as a little odd that tech stocks should tumble on the basis of unverified claims regarding the cost and type of chips used to create it - but I guess the dramatically lower cost to high end users factor alone might convince analysts that there really must be something to it. (It might also be seen as a good excuse to put a correction into an overheated bubble, perhaps?)
Also: I still don't really understand how you make a heap of money from releasing an open source product this way.
But anyway, on the weekend, I downloaded the app (on Android) and in my limited use so far - yes I'm really impressed.
I have mentioned more than once that the most useful AI product I have found is Perplexity, because it gives links to its sources of information, making it easy to check that it isn't "hallucinating" part of its answer.
Well, DeepSeek works in a very similar way, with links provided, and also this (kind of odd, but interesting) feature where it explains the "reasoning" used to give the actual answer prior to composing the answer.
Well, it does indeed feel like that Decemberists song "Everything is Awful", with the Trump inauguration and the somewhat distressing feeling that we are living in one of the Batman movies, as far as the weirdo cast of characters is concerned.
A billion or so words have been spilt online already about it, but here are my various thoughts:
a.if anything, far too few words have been spoken as to how incredibly dangerous it is for any world leader to be believe they are on a divine mission:
“Those who wish to stop our cause have tried to take my freedom, and
indeed to take my life,” he said, referencing a July 13 assassination
attempt in which a bullet grazed his ear. “But I felt then and believe
even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by
God to make America great again.”
Maybe it's because no one intelligent thinks he's a sincere believer in God, and this is just his usual narcissism spun to appeal to his Christofascist base? But this is the entire problem with him as a politician - we're supposed to just live with the fact that something he says might be meant to be taken seriously, or might be completely unrelated to what will actually happen. It's absurd, and it's absurdly dangerous if he is sitting in charge of a nuclear arsenal.
b. Elon and the salute: my theory, for what it's worth, is that he was high on ketamine (or something else), especially when you see the head movements in this video:
And yes, I reckon it was a Nazi salute done as a troll by a man off his face. Hilarious, Elon.
The inevitable falling out with Trump can't come soon enough.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Musk isn't approaching some sort of personal crash and burn - drug overdoes, car accident while under the influence, being shot by a former lover. Would not be surprised in the slighest.
c. The Pardons: Biden's for Milley and Fauci and the J6 committee were well deserved, and if there a serious non MAGA republican left in the country, they ought to be thanking him for saving the Republicans from embarrassing themselves by wasting months on go no-where investigations, and suffering electorally for it.
The pardons of Biden's family - I'm not aware of specific threats to investigate or prosecute them, but if any had been said, it's fine as far as I'm concerned.
I understand that Democrat concern that it gives Trump carte blanche to do the same, and to encourage his administration (and family) to do absolutely anything under cover of a last minute pardon. But such an authoritarian way of operating is not to go unnoticed, and Trump already has shown he hasn't a skerrick of interest in law and order if he thinks it's done him wrong (see all Jan 6 criminals pardoned, as well as crypto drug boy Ulbricht.) In short - Trump didn't need the example of Biden to pardon actual criminals. And if any of those released go on a revenge killing against any informant - it will be on Trump's head.
is quite fair and accurate. Let me extract some bits:
In 2024, Donald
Trump won the popular vote by 1.5 points. Trump and Democrats alike
treated this result as an overwhelming repudiation of the left and a
broad mandate for the MAGA movement. But by any historical measure, it
was a squeaker.
In 2020, Joe Biden won
the popular vote by 4.5 points; in 2016, Hillary Clinton won it by 2.1
points; in 2012, Barack Obama won it by 3.9 points; in 2008, Obama won
it by 7.2 points; and in 2004, George W. Bush won it by 2.4 points. You
have to go back to the 2000 election to find a margin smaller than
Trump’s.
Down-ballot, Republicans’
2024 performance was, if anything, less impressive. In the House, the
Republicans’ five-seat lead is the smallest since the Great Depression;
in the Senate, Republicans lost half of 2024’s competitive Senate races,
including in four states Trump won; among the 11 governor’s races, not a
single one led to a change in partisan control. If you handed an alien
these election results, they would not read like a tectonic shift.
And
yet, they’ve felt like one. Trump’s cultural victory has lapped his
political victory. The election was close, but the vibes have been a
rout. This is partially because he’s surrounded by some of America’s
most influential futurists. Silicon Valley and crypto culture’s embrace
of Trump has changed his cultural meaning more than Democrats have
recognized. In 2016, Trump felt like an emissary of the past; in 2025,
he’s being greeted as a harbinger of the future.
In July of 2024, Tyler Cowen, the economist and cultural commentator, wrote a blog post
that proved to be among the election’s most prescient. It was titled
“The change in vibes — why did they happen?” Cowen’s argument was that
mass culture was moving in a Trumpian direction. Among the tributaries
flowing into the general shift: the Trumpist right’s deeper embrace of
social media, the backlash to the “feminization” of society, exhaustion
with the politics of wokeness, an era of negativity that Trump captured
but Democrats resisted, a pervasive sense of disorder at the border and
abroad and the breakup between Democrats and “Big Tech.”
I
was skeptical of Cowen’s post when I first read it, as it described a
shift much larger than anything I saw reflected in the polls. I may have
been right about the polls. But Cowen was right about the culture.
Klein then examines each of the things Cowen discussed. I'll skip the social media talk, and go to the bit about corporations wanting to move Right:
The second factor is the corporate desire
to shift right. Over the 2020s, corporations shifted left, driven by
disgust with Trump, pressure from their work forces and perceived
pressure from their customers. This was reflected in the endless
corporate pronouncements over this-or-that social issue, the many green
pledges, the construction of vast D.E.I. infrastructures and a general
aesthetic of concerned listening on behalf of executives. Whatever mix
of sincerity and opportunism motivated these changes, it curdled into
resentment in recent years.
You can hear this in the interview
Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and Netscape co-founder who has
emerged as a major Trump adviser, did with my colleague Ross Douthat.
“Companies are basically being hijacked to engines of social change,
social revolution,” he said. “The employee base is going feral. There
were cases in the Trump era where multiple companies I know felt like
they were hours away from full-blown violent riots on their own campuses
by their own employees.” The biggest vibe shift Cowen misses in his
list is the anger C.E.O.s — particularly tech C.E.O.s — came to feel
toward their own workers and their desire to take back control.
Trump’s election acted as the pivot point for this trend, giving
corporate leaders cover to do what they’d long wanted to do anyway. “The
election has empowered some top executives to start speaking out in
favor of conservative policies, from tax cuts to traditional gender
roles,” The Financial Times reported. Announcement after announcement from major corporations pulling out
of climate change compacts or dismantling D.E.I. systems have been a
vibes multiplier, creating the sense of a major shift happening at all
levels of American society.
I like his take on the feckless Zuckerberg:
I interviewed
Zuckerberg in 2018, as he was still processing the backlash from the
2016 elections. He told me Meta had failed “on preventing things like
misinformation, Russian interference.” He worried over “a big rise of
isolationism and nationalism.” What made him confident in the future was
that, among millennials, “the plurality identifies as a citizen of the
world.”
Now Zuckerberg is going on Joe
Rogan’s show, chain dangling from his neck, to say that the
fact-checking Meta was doing was like “something out of ‘1984,’ ” that
companies like his own became too hostile to “masculine energy” and that
what makes him optimistic about Donald Trump is “I think he just wants
America to win.”
And this paragraph near the end is, I think, exactly right:
Perhaps the cultural momentum of Trumpism will give Trump’s presidency
added force. But it is at least as likely that it lures Trump and his
team into overreach. It is always dangerous to experience a narrow
victory as an overwhelming mandate. Voters — angry about the cost of
living and disappointed by Biden — still barely handed Trump the White
House. There is little in the election results to suggest the public
wants a sharp rightward lurch. But Trump and his team are jacked into
the online vibes-machine and they want to meet the moment they sense. I
doubt there would have been ideological modesty in any Trump
administration, but I am particularly skeptical we will see it in this
one.
David Lynch has passed away. It's hard to dislike an eccentric artist who manages to get eccentric movies made in Hollywood; and certainly I did enjoy Twin Peaks a lot, at least until it became clear it had that common problem of a mystery series that seemed to have been set up before knowing how it would be resolved. (Well, I assume this is what happened. But I never looked into it.)
That said, I think that his films are a tad overrated by critics, for my tastes. But I would always watch him in interviews, and he seemed a nice enough guy in real life.
I cancelled my Washington Post subscription, even though in the process they offered another year at $4 a month, which is incredibly cheap.
I just can't see another way a message can be sent to its owner's interference with the paper's content.
I had been saying I was probably more inclined to cancel the New York Times - but Bezos's games with the paper and direct sucking up to Trump (and reported turmoil within the staff) just didn't leave a choice.
I'm sure my action will now result in regret and realignment by Bezos, and then I can resubscribe - hahahaha. I live in hope.
PS: what tipped me over the edge was a column this morning praising Trump for getting the apparent peace deal in Gaza through - claiming that his "mad man" approach to foreign affairs works and maybe we need more of it! At the time of posting, there are only 4 comments, but I'm expecting it will attract many, many more criticisms by the end of the day.
I pretty much took the day off work yesterday, due to a lingering cold that seems to have caught me on the flight back from Singapore (thanks, woman directly behind me who had to most awful sounding cough intermittently - I suspect you as the source), then got into a social media semi-argument with someone who had read Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe book a decade or more ago and didn't really know about the "string wars" in physics in the 2000's and was reluctant to accept that Greene still promotes a too optimistic view of string theory's prospects.
Anyway, this led to me watching a lot of YouTube physics content, and reminded me that I had never watched enough of the channel Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal. It's really, really good.
Some of the content on The Institute of Art and Ideas YouTube page is very good on physics, too. (It reminded me that Roger Penrose thinks string theory is both "ugly" - contrary to claims by Greene that it's beautiful- and a complete waste of time.)
To suggest just one video I liked watching yesterday from those channels - I thought that Jacob Barande's summary of how quantum physics developed was well worth listening to:
I don't yet understand his take on the "reality" of the wavefunction, etc, for which I have to watch his full interview which goes for 2 1/4 hours!
I do think, though, that this issue of the way to understand the fundamentals is a really important topic.
I have a problem starting right there - the headline seems to assume that because the fire happened, LA was ipso facto "unprepared" for it.
Here's an early paragraph:
Experts said several key factors — including urban sprawl, a resistance
to clearing vegetation around homes, and a water system that’s not
designed to combat multiple major blazes at once — left L.A. exposed to
disaster. As climate change fuels record heat, leaving the hillsides
primed for wildfires to grow swiftly into massive conflagrations, these
factors led to catastrophe.
So "urban sprawl" - that happened many decades ago - is partly to blame? Well, I suppose humans learning to walk upright and build houses out of combustible material has a bit to do with it too, but seems not that much point in talking about it.
Sure, you can complain about the design of new subdivisions, I suppose:
Zeke Lunder, a wildfire mapping expert in Chico, California, and
director of an online outlet devoted to information about fires called
the Lookout, said the location and design of the Palisades neighborhood,
tucked between Topanga State Park and the Pacific Ocean, made it
especially vulnerable to fire — and almost impossible to protect.
I think that there are likely realistic limitations though, when trying to deal with this. Far better, I would assume, to require the new homes built to replace the old ones to have vastly improved resistance to catching alight from airborne embers - although even then, I suspect it may be difficult to make it foolproof as well as having a house attractive to the eye.
My biggest bugbear is one we saw in a different context in the Australian bushfires - the issue of clearing around houses. We saw this brought up by Right Wingers here who would complain that people were not allowed (for Greenie environmental reasons) to clear around their houses enough to protect them. In California, the WAPO article has people arguing this:
Before a home is threatened, experts say one of the few steps homeowners can take to make their property more fire-resistant is clearing it of grass and shrubs, removing fuel. In California, people living in risky areas are required to maintain a buffer around their homes — a five-foot perimeter free of vegetation known as “defensible space.”
But in practice, the rules haven’t been followed uniformly. Many homeowners are reluctant to remove wooden fences, replant their gardens and trim the lower limbs on pine trees. Aerial images of the Palisades neighborhood taken before the fire show homes surrounded by greenery, a common sight in wealthy areas where residents put a premium on privacy.
California’s five-foot rule “has been very controversial,” said Ken Pimlott, a former Cal Fire chief and firefighter for 30 years. “People are very upset about ‘What do I do about my fence, my plants I like,’” he said.
Oh come on! As with the biggest bushfire outbreaks in Australia in recent decades - when fires are spreading due to extremely high winds pushing embers kilometers ahead of the firefront, surely a 5 foot clearance of vegetation around a house is going to have very limited effect when you look at the big picture.
You always get cases in these types of fires of one house burning to the ground, and for some reason a neighbouring house might luck out and survive relatively unscathed. While in theory I would prefer not to have (say) a very combustible pine tree within a metre of house, I think it's fanciful in the extreme to think every house having a 5 foot clearance would make a significant difference to the total number of houses catching alight from embers falling from the skies in truly disastrous wind conditions. It's just common sense, I reckon.
The news conference marked the latest vivid display of Trump’s penchant for rambling tangents, insults, false statements and hyperbole.
The New York Times noted that he once again, absurdly, raised his long standing grievance against water efficient showers:
He waxed on about a favorite complaint during his first term: Shower heads and sink faucets that don’t deliver water, a symbol of a regulatory state gone mad. “It goes drip, drip, drip,” he said. “People just take longer showers, or run their dishwasher again,” and “they end up using more water.”
And this was their general take:
There was a lot of déjà vu in Tuesday’s news conference, recalling scenes from his first presidency. The conspiracy theories, the made-up facts, the burning grievances — all despite the fact that he has pulled off one of the most remarkable political comebacks in history. The vague references to “people” whom he never names. The flat declaration that American national security was threatened now, without defining how the strategic environment has changed in a way that could prompt him to violate the sovereignty of independent nations.
Of course, the media outlets of Murdoch and the Right will do their best to "sanewash" this. Here's the New York Post:
Trump threatened 25% tariffs against Canada and Mexico shortly after winning the Nov. 5 election, citing illegal immigration and illicit fentanyl imports.
Some observers speculated that he was making the threat as a bargaining tactic, and the leaders of both countries quickly pledged to work with the incoming commander in chief.
Trump also has jokingly suggested that Canada become the 51st state, while more seriously pressing for the US to acquire Greenland from Denmark and suggesting the US may need to reassert control of the Panama Canal Zone — topics he also revisited in his remarks.
The president-elect clarified at one point that the US would only use “economic force” to annex Canada before speaking rapturously about the potential benefits of a North American union.
“Canada and the US, that would really be something,” Trump said. “You get rid of that artificially drawn line, and you take a look at what that looks like, and it would also be much better for national security.”
Elsewhere in his comments, the incoming president complained that America’s neighbor to the north “is subsidized to the tune of about $200 billion a year, plus other things. They don’t essentially have a military. They have a very small military. They rely on our military. It’s all fine, but they got to pay for that.”
Uh, all it will take to stop it is for Putin to ring and say "Donald, we don't want a platform for ICBMs so close to Mother Russia. Just leave it alone, and let me have the bits of Ukraine I already have." And Trump will go "Sure, I hadn't thought of it that way."
Guess which city I ended up in for New Year's Eve? Details will follow in an update...
Update: So, I'm still busy, and caught a cold on the plane on the way back. Anyway, here I was, with a few hundred thousand friends, at the countdown for NYE:
Yeah, I managed to reach the city state it's hard to keep me away from, Singapore, for a short break.
New things done this time:
* ate fresh durian at a street side stall (and it's better than I expected - will eat again.)
* ate fresh jackfruit (pieces bought at a supermarket). Yes, intensely sweet and fruity, like putting a couple of packets of Juicy Fruit gum in your mouth at the same time. But gets less sweet towards the centre. Pretty delicious, but leftovers will make your hotel bar fridge smell very fruity when you open it again.
* ate at the vegetarian cafe in the basement of Buddha's Tooth Relic Temple. I knew it was there, just hadn't gone down to it before. Has a decent variety of food which is tasty and cheap, a large sitting area, and is pretty popular with women and men at lunch time. (Somehow, I expected more women, but plenty of men there too.)
* made it to the Singapore Botanical Gardens. Yes, been there half a dozen times, and had never made it to these gardens before. As expected, they are huge and gorgeously tropical. The orchid garden is probably the highlight for everyone, and now it features an airconditioned section that is a relief to hang around in after hours outdoors. Very beautiful, and will upload some photos later.
* spotted some otters, but in the water off Gardens by the Bay. Hench, the only proof I have is photos of an otter nose that would pop up every minute or so - the photo is like one of a small Loch Ness monster. But there were two noses, and the swirl they made gave me confidence it was otters I was watching. Unfortunately, though, did not witness them coming ashore. Next time!
* visited Mustafa Centre, the shambolically organised department store in Little India that is open 24 hours. Some interesting and dubious electronics and other stuff to look at, but don't expect any sense at all from the layout, or to have guides as to where anything is.
* made it to the little Jade Emperor temple (only recently built) that is besides the oldest Chinese temple in Singapore, the Thian Hock Keng Temple. (Again, somehow I had never managed to walk down this street on previous visits.) More about these temples in a later post, but just a note that the entry requirements to the (not open anyway) Jade Emperor's temple were really tough!
This is an interesting Comment is Free article at The Guardian - arguing that Christianity really caught on as a result of a plague in the 3rd century which made a religion with a teaching and obligation to help the poor and suffering look much better than the pagan religions, in which the gods were capricious and mainly to be feared and appeased.
I wonder if some will challenge the image of pagan religion this relies on, though?
And now, let's ask Musk's AI thingee Grok to generate a nativity scene featuring New Jersey drones:
I guess the bearded Mary is the highlight, and is particularly ironic given it's the vision of anti-woke Elon's AI; but what on Earth is the ground covered with? The shed itself is in groovy 60's psychedelic style too, for some reason. And baby Jesus looks like one of those dolls made by stuffing stockings.
I see that Ireland is having second thoughtsabout being a hub for AI data centres, due to the huge amount of electricity and water they eat up. AI results like the above should make them even more concerned...
I'm finding it a bit hard to think of a worse year over the last several decades, in a "reasons to feel optimistic about the direction the planet is heading in," sense. I guess people may have felt this way in (say) the mid 70's - a far from happy decade - but I was still somewhat of a techno-optimist at that stage and had a teenage life to live.
But gee, I mean - now we have the whole Middle East a complete humanitarian disaster again; much of Africa in terrible governance and humanitarian crisis, again; the danger to the West and Western interests from Russia and China, again; the unbelievable election of Trump, again; the loonies he wants to put in control and the drug addled, power hungry billionaire who helped put him in place (well, I guess this not a case of again - it's like a bad gothic Batman story come to life for the first time.) Another Christmas market terror incident in Europe just puts the cherry on top.
Also - overlaying all of this (which was not the case in the 70's) is the global climate disruption that Right wing (mostly ageing) idiots still refuse to acknowledge, and which we can only deal with by waiting for them to die.
Anyway, I'm talking about the vagus nerve because of this interesting story at CNN:
Fournie had been married to his longtime sweetheart for two
years, and had no reason to suspect he had any mental health issues.
“I just thought to myself, ‘If this is it, if this is all
there is to life — if it ended now, I’d be OK with it,’” Nick, now 62
and based in Illinois, said of that fateful day outdoors nearly 40 years
ago.
But one day as he was mowing the lawn, his perspective on life abruptly
flipped from light to dark. The shift would set him and his wife, Mary,
on a tumultuous, yearslong journey of fighting for his well-being and
another chance at a happy life together — until they learned of an
alternative, obscure treatment that would change everything.
I wonder how often that happens - I am much more used to the idea that it develops somewhat gradually, or perhaps as a result of a sudden crisis such as a nervous breakdown.
