Iran, or We Fucking Told You So

What follows is some incoherent thoughts about the war in Iran and why we're all in Hell:

1. George W Bush must be laughing himself to sleep every night, and Dick Cheney must be laughing down in the fires of Dante's Ninth Circle, at the thought that no matter how stupid, mendacious and ill-prepared their invasion of Iraq was, the Trump Administration is doing it so much worse and making them look like FDR and Alan Dulles by comparison
2. I'm not the first or most eloquent person to make this observation, but the Venezuela thing is what cooked us, because it went off without any hitches for the Trump people, and so now they think doing the same thing to Iran will be just as easy
3. My nearest gas price has gone up to $5.09 per gallon, as opposed to $4.49 per gallon before last week. We need stickers on every pump of Trump pointing and saying "I did this!" Like those Biden stickers, but honest, given that the high gas prices that happened during Biden's term were a result of Trump going to the Middle East and telling them to ramp down production to raise prices
4. Though some of this is to be blamed on Biden, because he could (maybe?) have shut the war in Gaza down, but instead gave Netanyahu carte blanche and now we're riding our bombs down, Dr Strangelove-style, alongside the Israelis
5. I haven't checked my stock portfolio but I'm guessing that all this geopolitical risk is making my retirement accounts crater, which is meaningless for right now, but would mark the first time since I lost my job (almost exactly a year ago) that my net worth has gone down. I say meaningless, but since I'll probably have to start selling off my investments to keep myself going until I find a job, it'd be nice to have a portfolio that lasts me more than a week
6. There's a lot to be said about a person with a drinking problem and no actual leadership experience running the Pentagon and talking about "missions from God" and "triggering Armageddon"
7. How much cultural heritage has been destroyed because of this war and the one in Iraq, plus the Syrian civil war that just "ended" and everything else? It's relatively unimportant in the face of civilian deaths, infrastructure collapse and everything, but also... the Middle East is one of the oldest centers of civilization in the world, which means there's a lot of priceless history being bombed to dust right now
8. Just saying, the Iraq War gave us ISIS/Daesh, so what's this war going to throw up that we'll spend the next two decades dealing with?
9. Please spare me your bad-faith arguments that we're liberating the women of Iran from oppression: on one hand, an Iranian woman with a degree in medical technology once told me that her classes back in Tehran were easily half female; on the other hand, the US is steadily rolling back abortion rights and access to contraceptives is constantly being debated as getting cut next, plus a bunch of "thinkers" near and dear to the administration keep complaining about American women being allowed to vote
10. They probably need to cancel the Men's World Cup this year
11. On a related note, what does this war mean for Trump's chances to win next year's FIFA Peace Prize? Or will FIFA president Gianni Infantino give him two peace prizes?
12. Trump is a bad president: incompetent, intellectually lazy, dishonest, gross, uninformed about the world, uninterested in what effects his decisions will have on the world. He's also the most influential president of my lifetime, in terms of how much he's been able to push through
13. What would it take for someone like Maine Senator Susan Collins to stand up to him on literally anything, at this point? I ask because if the Democrats retake both House and Senate in November and impeach Trump, there's still no way to get enough senators to convict. And even if they did, we'd end up with President JD Vance, who'd just pardon Trump anyway
14. Fuck

10 Years of This Shit

Funnily enough, the title of this post isn't precisely, or only, referring to the political stuff. 2016 was the first in this current sequence of terrible, terrible years, and it started off with a bang when I logged into the AV Club and learned that David Bowie had died. I was reminded of that when I started seeing think pieces, on Facebook and on the Guardian, among other places, marking that anniversary. And these have been followed by 10-year tributes for Alan Rickman, which means we're going to get to relive the Great Celebrity Die-Off of 2016.

So I wanted to get out ahead of all that, and just note, in among all the horrible shit going on in Minneapolis and Alligator Alcatraz and Greenland and Ukraine and Venezuela, that we're going to be reminded of how awful that felt back in 2016. And the worst part is, that all began in January 2016 and went through the whole year, until we got treated to Brexit and Donald Trump's first election win.

I was also thinking about the good things from that year, of which there were few, but a couple did spring to mind. One was, of course, Leicester City's Premier League title, which remains one of the greatest sporting fairy tales I've witnessed. They had a good few years after that, even though they sacked Claudio Ranieri as manager the following season, but then they had an ever worse set of seasons until they were relegated a couple of times. Sic transit gloria.

The other good things that I remember from 2016 are in the dating realm, where I went on four dates with someone and even smooched her a couple of times, the first since I'd moved back from London. I also got a mini-raise that year, also my first since London, although the following year I learned just how grossly I was being underpaid by my company.

Anyway, this post isn't about me. It's more about solidarity: we're going to be seeing a lot of commemorations of ten years of All This Shit, even as All This Shit burns down even more intensely around us than it did then. Take a break from social media and the news as needed, and set boundaries so that people don't bring that kind of thing up as a way of making small talk (I have people in my family who do this). As shit as it all is, and as shit as it's all likely to remain for a while, we'll get through it as long as we take care of ourselves and of each other.

So Long, 2025: Don't Let the Door Hit You on the Way Out

You know, I've been writing these posts every year since 2016. Some of them have titles like, "Gosh, what an awful year" or "Another year I'll be glad to see gone". When I looked forward, it was stuff like, "Things are gonna get worse after 2024".

Thing is, they really all have been terrible in so many ways. We should have noticed in 2016 when all the celebrities started dying, completely out of nowhere, but by the end of that year it was clear we'd crossed into the darkest timeline. Even when we got a respite at the end of 2020 by voting out Trump, 2021 started with a deadly riot at the Capitol and the deadliest phase of the Covid pandemic was about to start.

So, uh, with that in mind, welcome to my recap of 2025! It's been another bad'un, both at the macro level and the micro level. Looking at the wider world, political chaos and violence have been the norm, and while it's been disheartening to see how many institutions simply caved to whatever nutty Trump demands came their way, it's been good to see some pushback from the grassroots level. Though it's not going to mean a thing if the Democrats don't take back the House and Senate in the midterms and impose some accountability on this administration.

Oh, and btw, it still won't mean a thing if they do. Realistically, even if Democrats sweep a supermajority in both chambers and impeach Trump, he'll get pardoned by President JD Vance, and whatever Vance can't pardon him for, the Supreme Court will just say he had immunity or something. I'm not actively worrying about how bad things will get in 2026, 2027 or 2028 because I can't change any of those things, but I still sometimes find myself wondering what absolute chaos will happen because people last year thought Joe Biden was too old.

As a final point on the political stuff, whenever Democrats regain the levers of power, I'm really worried about how hard it'll be to undo everything that's happened just this year. A bunch of agencies, like USAID and Voice of America, are probably not coming back at all, because both parties seem to have lost interest in soft power, but apart from that, the health and economic data collection isn't going to bounce back easily - even if whoever's in the White House and Congress after 2028 has any interest in resuming all the research and data collection that we had before this year, any datasets we have on, say, infant mortality or broadband penetration or basically anything will have these large gaps between 2025-2029 that'll skew our understanding of what was happening.

And that's to say nothing of the sustained cyberattack that was DOGE, in which a bunch of unelected Elon Musk fanboys got a hold of the federal government's data and can now do whatever they want with it. That situation isn't going to change when President Gavin Newsom or whoever gets sworn in, and we're gonna be feeling the aftereffects for generations.

Okay, but how was it for me?

Ugh.

As I may have mentioned, I lost my job in March - incidentally, five years to the day since my boss at State Farm told us we'd be working from home because of the then-nascent coronavirus. But we'd be back in a couple of weeks, they assured us. In my five subsequent years of work, I spent 1.5 days working in an office, and those were for office parties.

The job search sucked, with three legitimate callbacks and one that was a waste of time because it paid way too little (like, it would have meant a $36k pay cut). On the plus side, the last one then led to my first proper interview of the year, so we'll see how that went.

The first thing I did, though, was schedule out my time for every week, so that I'd ensure I was spending my time doing the things that mattered to me. This meant that I had time for writing, job-hunting, going to the gym, learning, and so forth. Of all of these, the writing is my one bright spot for 2025, both because I made sure I spent a couple of hours on it each day and because I was in that TV writing class I've talked about so much.

Compared to previous years, where I found it tough to get new projects off the ground, this year I ended up writing four TV scripts (one spec and three pilots), plus plotting out four novels (two rewrites and two new ideas). I also came up with ideas for movies, a non-fiction book, and a rewrite of a novella I wrote a few years ago. It's hard to say whether I'll be able to maintain this momentum, especially when I find a job again and don't have quite as much time anymore, but at least I know what to work on.

On the dating side, once I lost my job, this was never going to be a great year, but at the very least it seems to have been better than 2024. I went on a couple of dates, had a phone call vibe-check that was supposed to turn into a date but then she bailed, and after Thanksgiving I reconnected with someone I'd gone out with back in 2023 - we've only been texting, but it's nice to chat with her again, wherever this leads.

Fitness-wise, I got a lot more serious about going to the gym, even though I had to cancel my monthly personal training sessions. I maintained my schedule of going 4 times each week, and I way overshot my original goal to lift a total of 300,000 lbs, by hitting over 1.2 million lbs. This included that period of two months when I was in Europe and wasn't going to the gym. Not to be shallow, but the friend I've been texting noted that I looked fit when I sent her a picture of myself next to the Christmas tree, so it looks like at least all that gym work has had some effect.

On the financial front, once again, it was never going to be a great year, but I was quick to cut down on certain spending, and was lucky enough to be able to lower my rent quite substantially. All of which means that, even though I haven't had any money come in since September (when my unemployment ran out), I still have a fair bit of runway, even without raiding my retirement accounts.

As far as the life/other goals, mixed bag again - I didn't get out to as many cultural things as I'd have liked, but I got to some. I didn't leave the Bay Area as many times as I'd have liked, but traveling is expensive, and anyway, I managed to fuck off to Europe for two months, which was cool. Still didn't do enough decluttering, though.

There's no dressing this up: personally, 2025 was a shit year, and it was a shit year in part because the macro directly affected my micro (I'm pretty sure I'd still have a job if Kamala Harris had won last November). But amid the shit, I made the best of it where I could, and that's the important thing. Now... it'd be nice to have a year where I thrive, both personally and professionally. I'm not due anything, because the universe doesn't work like that, but the hope is that I unlock something, whether internally or externally, that makes that year (decade? Lifetime?) of thriving possible.

For as many years in a row have been terrible, in however many ways (2026 looks to be the 11th bad'un in a row), the hope is what keeps me going. Things may not clear up in 2026, or 2029, or, honestly, in my lifetime. But something will come along. It'll do so for me, and it'll do so for you.

Happy New Year, and don't let the bastards grind you down.

Marvel's Dark Reign Was the Perfect Trump-Era Preview

When I read Douglas Wolk's All of the Marvels last year, I noted how Wolk drew a comparison between the Dark Reign storyline, in which Spider-Man's arch nemesis Norman Osborn becomes the de facto ruler of the US, and the first Trump administration. This past week I got to see for myself what Wolk was talking about, when I read the X-Men issues that took place during Dark Reign.

Wolk makes the point that Dark Reign is just an imagining of how to apply the authoritarian playbook, which I think accounts for the similarities. But the similarities really are striking: Osborn responds to a flashpoint of political violence in San Francisco by sending in his fake Avengers (similar to the Thunderbolts, a group of villains disguised as heroes). He then uses that as an excuse to suspend civil rights and puts the city on lockdown, portraying SF as an ungovernable hellhole that only he can solve.

Obviously in real life this stuff has happened elsewhere, mostly Portland and Washington DC. And as far as I can tell, none of the things the Trump administration is responding to involved anti-mutant protests or the introduction of bio-Sentinel robots designed to trigger when in the presence of mutants.

But as I say, the similarities are striking, especially when they're rendered against the backdrop of Union Square and other parts of SF that I know. Reading these issues I didn't get a sense that this was back in 2009, long before most people were worried about the far-right or about fascist takeovers.

It's also a good encapsulation of how Wolk sees the various modes of resistance: fighting back doesn't work, especially when it's a small group, like when Hellion gathers a bunch of mutants together and they get their asses kicked by Emma Frost's Dark X-Men; hunkering down also doesn't work, as when Cyclops first locks down the X-Men's base in the Marin Headlands and then raises Asteroid M to serve as a separate mutant state; nor does Emma Frost's attempt to moderate the chaos from the inside do much, as she finds herself arresting Hellion's group and delivering them to Osborn's base to be tortured.

It doesn't come up in the X-Men parts, but Wolk notes that what brings down Osborn at the end of Dark Reign (apart from getting beaten up by Iron Man, Thor and Captain America) is journalism. That is to say, documenting his administration's misdeeds, who they hurt, and where they're getting their funding from, among other questions, is what lays bare the truth of Osborn's plan. The implication is clear: exposing everything they're trying to hide is the main thing that'll help us.

Too bad Obama can't step in at the end, like in Dark Reign, and put a stop to it in one fell swoop.

A Tangent on Rule of Law and Property Rights in Byzantium

This two-month trip to Europe has allowed me to finish a couple of books that have been sitting on my TBR pile for too long, among which is John Julius Norwich's Short History of Byzantium. Lord Norwich is perhaps not my favorite historian, but I appreciate his ability to put together a coherent narrative for the thousand-year history of the Byzantine Empire, even if he himself didn't add any new scholarship to the subject. He also had a nice and catty turn of phrase, which livened up the books of his that I've read.

One of these bons mots came when Lord Norwich suggested that a Byzantine emperor nationalizing a certain industry amounted to socialism, avant la lettre. He was being cheeky, given that he was no fan of socialists or communists, but his joke points to something relevant beyond his target, which is the role of property rights in the concept of rule of law.

Lord Norwich's joke was that this emperor was nationalizing the means of production by taking over this industry. I take it as a fair point, although a government doesn't have to be socialist to ignore property rights - it just has to assume that every item of property in the country belongs to the government, which in this case can be a single monarch or junta.

It got me thinking about a concept I've been turning over in my head for a while (which I acknowledge is probably old hat to scholars who study this stuff professionally), which is that you can't have rule of law without well-defined property rights. In this case, I define rule of law as the idea that the law applies equally to everyone, whether that's the king, the president or the ruling council. Property rights, for my purposes, consist of the idea that certain items or intangibles don't belong to the government.

To put it another way, if there are no property rights, then effectively everything in a country belongs to the government, and you as a citizen (or subject, I suppose), legally own nothing. The government can take your house, your car or your laptop whenever it wants and there's nothing you can do about it. This means there's also no rule of law, because if the government owns everything then the law is whatever it says it is at that time. This is indeed a pretty good definition of the legal status in autocratic empires such as Rome and Byzantium, but probably also France under the absolute rule of Louis XIV or China under its Communist Party.

On the other hand, if there's a mechanism for a private citizen to obtain legal redress from the government for property being taken away, then that means the government's powers are limited, and rule of law becomes possible. More than that, there should then also be a well-defined legal basis for resolving disputes between individual citizens. I don't know anything about Roman or Byzantine law, but despite the voluminous legal codices put together by emperors such as Justinian I, I assume there wasn't any concept of individual rights as we understand it today. This is probably also how Napoleonic France approached things, despite having sprung out of the Revolution: I suspect that Napoleon was okay with liberty, fraternity and equality as long as he got to run everything - and take whatever he wanted from whoever he wanted.

Lord Norwich's joke may have been aimed at well-heeled Trotskyites of his acquaintance, but you can also argue that English history has been a slow crawl along that continuum from absolute power wielded by the strong, whose monopoly on state violence meant that if they really wanted your land, they could take it. Documents like the Magna Carta were the first steps toward the other end of the continuum, where the monarch and the state could be held accountable for injuries to individuals, even if the individuals they had in mind in 1215 were landowning nobles and other potentates.

It's not a long distance from these concepts to our modern understanding of what governments can do with their own citizens. Prior to the Second World War and the Holocaust, international law essentially suggested that a government could do whatever it wanted with its own citizens, whether they owed allegiance to the head of state or a duly elected government. When the Nazi government decided to massacre millions of its own Jewish, Roma, LGBTQ and disabled citizens, among others, the world community essentially decided that this state of affairs couldn't stand, and built mechanisms to hold accountable leaders (if not nations) who tried to do the same.

The success of these measure is debatable, but it's notable that the debate exists at all. Apparently, when an Armenian survivor of the 1915 genocide killed one of his Turkish oppressors, there was no legal framework to mitigate the charges against the Armenian, who was tried for murder. Now it seems logical to us that a crime like the Armenian Genocide or the Holocaust should be prosecutable - even if international law scholars would point out that there's still a lot more nuance than how lay people understand this question.

Anyway, this is how my brain works - John Julius Norwich makes a cheeky comment about socialist Byzantine Emperors, and I find my way straight through to absolutist monarchies, rule of law and crimes against humanity. All of which, it must be said, are questions that run straight through Byzantine history anyway, if in different contexts to our own. At any rate, all things being equal, I'd rather live in a society where the government can't just jack my shit with impunity, because that also means the government can't just shoot me and toss me in a ditch whenever it wants.

At any rate, if a government did that to me now, one hopes there would be some debate about whether it was justified. It's a big question, and one we've been trying to solve throughout human history.

Thought of this song today, no particular reason

 

Year in Review: Things Are Gonna Get Worse After 2024

There were a couple of angles to take with this, including thinking of just doing a RIP post on Jimmy Carter, who passed away today. But I don't know that I had much to say about Carter, since his presidency only overlapped with my life by about sixteen months. And there's only so many times you can trot out the Simpsons joke about him being "History's Greatest Monster".

Carter's passing, just a few weeks before Trump takes over again, does feel like a symbolic moment. It's hard to imagine two more diametrically opposed people. Everything I've read about Carter, even before he died, has indicated that he was deeply moral, even if not always very politically savvy; only the most QAnon-addled MAGA folks could ever suggest Trump is in any way a moral person. On the other hand, Trump has been a lot more successful politically, effectively becoming the face of the GOP for the last decade and reshaping American life even out of office. 

Though I was also pleased to see that Carter was more influential, on a policy level, than most commentators give him credit for. According to a write-up in the Guardian, he started the Department of Education, the Department of Energy and FEMA, as well as providing inspectors-general for federal agencies and protections for whistleblowers. It also says he signed more domestic legislation into law than any president since WWII, other than Lyndon Johnson.

So he's earned his plaudits, and his exit from the scene just as America's worst president comes back to fuck things up again. It's notable that Trump's looking at undoing a number of signature Carter achievements, like the Department of Education. I think if I were 100 and facing that sort of attack on my legacy, I'd have had enough too.

It's funny, though, that Carter's passing isn't part of a big celebrity migration into the beyond, like 2016 was. That sense of all the celebrities dying at once felt epochal, especially when Brexit and Trump arrived - kind of like they sensed what was coming and decided to get while the getting was good.

2024 hasn't had a similar level of celebrities dying, though of course there have been many, some noted here on this blog. But it's definitely felt like a year of dysfunction just like 2016, and of economic dislocation that's bitten the Democrats on the ass.

The main difference is that, unlike 2016, we have a template for the coming four years: it'll be chaotic and ugly and stupid, and probably a lot of people are going to die that didn't need to. The question will be whether we get another pandemic, complete with botched response, or if we get to graduate to foreign policy crises, such as shooting wars in the Middle East or Asia.

But that's at the macro level - how was my year?

Eh.

In some ways it was pretty good. I felt more comfortable with the work I was doing at my job, especially after a grim 2023 in which I was overwhelmed by a new topic. I finally made a decent fist of submitting a novel to agents, even though I didn't get any interest (or not yet, anyway). And I had a couple of good trips to Australia, Italy and London, which pretty much completed my migration out of pandemic life (it took me a while to get comfortable with certain aspects of travel). I even got to upgrade to business class again, for the flight to Sydney, which I can say is the absolute best way to fly there.

On the other hand, I had trouble getting new story ideas off the ground, and the dating scene was a bit disappointing, especially compared to last year, which was one of my best years for dating. I spent a lot of time struggling with my weight, and while it seems to be going in the right direction, I've still got a ways to go.

Overall, it's also been hard to shake a fog of... something. I wasn't sure if it was depression, while a therapist I had for a while assumed it was anxiety. To which I say, por que no los dos? Of course, it wasn't major clinical depression - I was able to work and cook and get out to the gym. Actual clinical depression is no joke, and I'm glad not to have to deal with that. But it's true that a lot of things I normally like felt less compelling this year, as I hinted at in my review of all the media I consumed.

One example is the final book in Tad Williams's Last King of Osten Ard series, which I've been trying to read but haven't been gripped by the way I was with earlier books. I don't think the problem is the book, I think it's my own lack of focus and tiredness at the end of the day, when I should be happily plowing through dozens of pages per night.

Now, as I suggested earlier, it hasn't all been bad, and there are signs of promise for the early part of the year, at least. I took an online TV writing class in October and November through UCLA's continuing education program, and I'm taking the followup, 60 Minute TV Drama I, to strike while the iron is hot. If nothing else, I'm hoping to get some new insights into how to tell stories, which will improve my writing in other ways.

Beyond that, I'm looking forward to more exercise, more travel, and a clearer view on where I want to be going. I've always felt pulled in opposite directions by the big life goals (get published, get laid, get fit, get rich and get out of the house more), but I think the important thing will be to keep them all moving, at least a bit.

I did manage to get some stuff done during the first Trump presidency, after all, notably going to Japan for the first time, getting a girlfriend and pulling down a big pay bump when I switched jobs. Thinking about it, the feeling of unease has been there all year, but has felt a lot more intense since the election, so I think it's also a matter of time, and of getting over that huge disappointment.

Anyway, this is probably my last post of the year, so I'll see you all on the other side. It'll be a tough four years (and probably longer, even if Trump is term-limited), but what's keeping me going is the knowledge that things are cyclical. And while things can always get worse - truly, always - they can also get better. That progress will be measured in millimeters and fractions of an inch in 2025, but the potential is there.

Or in the words of my favorite movie this year: "Let's fucking go" and "Maximum effort"

Quick One on the Hunter Biden Pardon

Whenever I'm with my mom, she'll usually ask me what I think about some cultural or political thing that's going on, and generally speaking, I refuse to venture an opinion. There are lots of reasons for this, whether some deep-seated thing about being criticized later for my answer, or because I honestly don't care - when she asked me over Thanksgiving about the prospect of President Biden pardoning his son Hunter, it was primarily the second one.

I haven't followed that case a ton, beyond reading a couple of articles here and there, as well as listening to Hunter's interview on Marc Maron's WTF podcast a few years ago. So I don't know the ins and outs, beyond whatever's filtered out through osmosis into the wider culture. Based on that, my read is that Hunter probably is a bit dodgy, but that his dad probably isn't... or isn't dodgy for the same reasons.

When President Biden announced this week that he'd be pardoning his son for any crimes he may have committed between 2014 and 2024, I thought about that conversation with my mom, and then decided that I was okay with it. Part of it is probably that phenomenon where a party's voters agree with an action when their party's leaders do it, and disagree with it when the other party's leaders do it. But part of it is also a slightly nihilistic satisfaction at seeing the Democrats doing something that the Republicans have been happy to do forever (and make no mistake, Bill Clinton made dodgy pardons too).

Trump's been talking about pardoning the January 6th rioters forever. Some news headlines have suggested that Biden's pardon of Hunter gives Trump the "excuse", but it was always going to happen. And Trump's going to pardon himself for the January 6th thing and the missing documents case. That was going to happen regardless of what Biden did.

So the reason I'm broadly in favor is that, if Biden hadn't pardoned his son, Hunter would be at the mercy of Trump's Justice Department as of January 20th. Make no mistake, they'd have thrown the book at him, and they wouldn't have minded any of the bleating about political witch-hunts that would have ensued. At least this way, Biden's earning some of the criticism he's getting from the right, and his son is off the hook.

For the moment, anyway. When I brought it up with my mom today at dinner, she was a little less pleased with it than I was, but she also pointed out that Trump's people are going to... ahem... find some trumped-up charges to get Hunter on. Realistically speaking, laws are only effective insofar as they're enforced, so there's probably very little stopping Trump from ordering his attorney general to have Hunter thrown in jail on general principle. Especially given that the Supreme Court ruled this year that the president can commit crimes while in office.

But this pardon is a last middle finger to Trump and the whole ecosystem around him, which depends on sycophants to enthusiastically do whatever he says, as well as moderates to criticize the Democrats more severely for doing the same things that the Republicans do. The whole "when they go low, we go high" thing has been totally invalidated - and if it's bad for democracy and the rule of law that certain pardons are skirting dangerously close to dodgy territory, then too bad. I'm sick of Democrats getting steamrolled by Republican gamesmanship (cf. Merrick Garland's nomination to the Supreme Court in 2016).

Anyway, what's bad for democracy and the rule of law isn't so much a father pardoning his wayward son, shady as he may or may not be, as a convicted felon and known insurrectionist getting voted into office on promises of being a dictator on day one and of prosecuting his political rivals. I wish the pearl-clutching brigade had spent more time criticizing that for the past eight years, rather than enabling Trump's worst instincts.

The Darkest and/or Stupidest Timeline

I won't deny that it's been very hard to be existential the last couple of weeks. The worst possible outcome of the elections came about, and now all we have to look forward to in the lead-up to January 20th is learning exactly how screwed we are. Matt Gaetz as attorney general? Sure! Some dum-dum from Fox News who doesn't believe in germs as Defense secretary? Hey, why not? The anti-vax, brain-worm guy in charge of Health and Human Services? The more the merrier.

All the good news at the moment feels transitory at best (e.g. the Onion buying Infowars), or a bit infuriating (e.g. Marine Le Pen potentially going to jail for misuse of EU funds). That last is infuriating because we could have short-circuited Trump's return, but we decided to dismantle all our guardrails for democracy and rule of law instead. So now I get to worry if the food I eat is going to kill me, and I won't be able to get vaccinated against diseases anymore. I'd inject bleach, like Trump suggested during the pandemic, but I won't even be able to tell if it's pure bleach or adulterated with some crap or something.

I did engage in one meaningless act of defiance (two, if you want to be nitpicky) and deleted both my Twitter accounts this week. There was a little hemming and hawing over conversations I've had over the years, but fuck it, I'd been inactive so long (except for posting links to this blog) that I don't even miss it.

Instead I'm now on Bluesky, which, yeah, feels a tiny bit like old Twitter, and also doesn't come with the soul-crushing negativity of the last few years. I'm following a lot of writers and interesting people there, so hopefully my timeline evolves past people comparing it to Twitter. That said, I have already had to block a fascist, just to give you a sense of how much the sewers are overflowing.

The best part is that I fired my therapist last month, because I wasn't getting much out of it and she kept minimizing my concerns, saying it was just anxiety. That may be true, but I caught myself wishing I could talk to her last week - until I realized that she'd probably just have told me I was spiraling again. If they do deport everyone in January, I might drop her a line again, assuming neither of us has been sent to Venezuela or been buried in a ditch somewhere in the Central Valley.

On the plus side, now that another pandemic and lockdown is pretty much inevitable, I don't feel like I have to defend my continued Covid-hoarding. Indeed, I may have to increase my reserves of toilet paper, paper towels and Kleenex boxes, ahead of any further catastrophes.

There's also the possibility of moving to Europe, but a good many places are already run by fascists (Italy), or are under threat of it in the near future (Germany). This might be the opportunity my dad's been waiting for, that I finally move back to Italy. Or I might try Ireland, which is apparently an expensive real estate market, so I'll feel right at home not being able to buy a house there. I also have to keep on my little sister's good side, so that if needed, she can sponsor me to move to Australia.

On the plus side, if I have to move to a place with fresh air, public transportation and single-payer healthcare, I'll probably get a million times healthier within a month. Which means more McDonald's! Also, I know where the Taco Bells in London and Sydney are, so I'll be covered from that perspective.

Hmm. Better pack the statins anyway, just in case.

This post started as an aimless brain-dump of my thoughts on the past few weeks and then turned into a standup act, so maybe it's best to end here. I'll be back in the next few weeks with various musings on TV shows, movies, comics and roundups of 2024, but I'll end with this final thought:

We haven't really had a good year since 2015 (which itself was pretty sucky for a number of people). My hope with the election was that we could move toward turning a corner, but now I see that at least the next four years are gonna suck hard too. I'm hoping to find ways to make them suck less, at least within my circle of control, but 13-plus years of suckage is a long time, there's no getting around it.

In the meantime, come find me on Bluesky!

American Politics Has Too Much Tolerance for Nonsense

My brain is about 80 to 85% comic books these days, but I kinda missed the boat on posting about Episode 5 of X-Men '97, and now I'm stuck waiting until the end of the season. I could have written about The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl series by Ryan North and Erica Henderson, but decided it might be better to write about something else (although I'll get to Squirrel Girl at some point soon).

So you're getting a post about politics instead. Specifically the amount of foolishness that pervades electoral politics in our current age. I hinted at my thesis in a post I wrote last year, in which I wondered what the heck was up with Britain, but the main point for today is that American voters are oddly forgiving of absolute nonsense.

I should qualify that I'm mostly referring to, erm, one side of the aisle, though I do think that most establishment Democrats also fall for their own brands of, dare I say, malarkey. It's kind of built into the whole exceptionalism thing, which is why Britain seems to suffer from this malaise too.

But what do I classify as guff, nonsense and malarkey? It goes beyond structural disagreements about economics. I do think that most conservative/libertarian economic ideals are built on fantasy, at best, as when the UK pushes through a bunch of unfunded tax cuts (as Liz Truss tried to do last year), or when entire financial sectors are given carte blanche to gamble with everyone else's money (as we saw with the savings and loan collapse of the 80s, or the subprime mortgage credit crunch in 2008).

Rather, I'm talking about some of the more outre behavior of the West's populist leaders. I've seen a number of variations on the idea that "I never thought the apocalypse would be this stupid", and it's hit home for me. I'm talking about conspiracy theories that Sandy Hook was a false flag operation, or that the Uvalde shooter was a trans person, or that when Barack Obama told the people of Britain that Brexit was a bad idea, some dummies thought it was a set-up because he said leaving the EU would put Britain "at the back of the queue" for trade deals, and Americans don't say "queue", so he must have been coached by Remoaners, ergo and QED.

I could also go into the fact that people were setting fire to 5G masts during the pandemic, or that they were listening to some roided up idiot agree with his podcast guests that they should be taking an anti parasitic to not get Covid (which is, er, a virus), or that some folks were blaming the 2020 and 2021 wildfires on Black Lives Matter because they forgot that BLM can also stand for Bureau of Land Management... though I don't understand why the Bureau of Land Management would be setting fires.

(Don't try to explain it. If you give this theory any credit, you're stupid and I don't want to hear it)

(Also, I could list all the QAnon conspiracy ideas but we'd be here all day. Though I'm particularly fond of the idea that JFK Jr faked his death and that he was all set to make his return at Dealey Plaza a couple of years ago, where he'd immediately join Donald Trump's presidential ticket)

It seems to me that Americans are particularly susceptible to falling for nonsense. Part of it comes back to Richard Hofstadter's essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", which I haven't read but from what I know of it encompasses this idea that "they" are all out to get "us" and we need some demagogue to protect us. "They" could be communists, Black people, LGBTQ people, foreigners, or simply the favorite target of bigots throughout the ages, Jews (who are supposedly the ones behind communists and foreigners anyway). 

I get that conspiracy theories come from people feeling disempowered, whether politically, socially or economically. What I don't understand is why feeling disempowered means blindly swallowing every false and/or incoherent thing Donald Trump says. Trump is not exactly disempowered himself - he shits on a golden toilet and has a bunch of buildings with his name on them all over the world. He does and says some of the crudest things you can imagine, but a not-insignificant portion of American Christians think he's basically the Second Coming of Christ.

This is why I think Americans are particularly susceptible to nonsense. Nobody in Britain thought Boris Johnson was Jesus, or particularly smart - they just voted for him because he's an edgelord with an Oxford degree and they thought it'd be a laugh. Geert Wilders and Giorgia Meloni are deeply weird individuals (she's part of some Italian Neo-fascist strand that has built its identity on the radical agrarian society of Tolkien's Hobbits), but no one has built a quasi-religious conspiratorial framework around either of them.

Hell, Australians are probably the most naturally libertarian people I've ever encountered, but because the idea of a "fair go" is so ingrained in the national psyche, they found the political will to ban assault weapons after Port Arthur and have made great strides to attempt to atone for what they did to the Indigenous Peoples from the First Fleet through to the 20th century. Whereas in America, supposedly the land of the free and a place where "all men are created equal", we give undue attention to people who say that their right to buy assault rifles outweighs children's right to not be shot to pieces in school.

I don't know why exactly Americans fall for stupid and lazy arguments so easily, but I do know that this tendency is what underlies the big threats to our society. Trump may run around telling people that he should have won the election, but for some reason a lot of people are prepared to believe him, despite, or because, his arguments are so flimsy. If so many people are willing to disbelieve their own eyes on the say-so of the Party, at least the Party could come up with some lies that are internally consistent and not the deranged power fantasies of people who should know better.

Authoritarian Rule Will Look Like Office Space

I feel like democracy and open society are having a bad moment at the time, in part because their proponents aren't doing a good job communicating their benefits. People like me (and I'm not saying liberals or progressives or lefties, but all people who care about free elections and less state control) can say that the Republicans are driving us toward authoritarianism or fascism - and it's true - but to many/most Republicans, or to so-called independents, it just comes off as left-wing sour grapes.

What's worse is that the average Republican seems to think that authoritarian rule is a good thing, as long as it means smashing the libs. There's a certain tendency toward this on the left, too, by the way, but the difference is that no progressive or Democratic figure is trying to dismantle the administrative state, while large parts of the GOP are. But the upshot is that, whatever side of the aisle you're on, the allure of suspending democratic norms is appealing if it means stopping the other side from "ruining America".

So how does the average, right-thinking person who doesn't want to see authoritarian rule in America communicate this in terms that even the most blinkered, hang-em-all independent can appreciate?

My suggestion for the Democratic Party, and whatever Republicans out there still believe in rule of law: authoritarianism will be like being stuck in a job you hate, and that you can't quit.

What does that mean?

Think about the worst job you've ever had. Maybe it's a retail job where they change shifts on you at short notice, or where they dock your pay if you have to go to the doctor or get your car fixed. Maybe it's an office job where the management keeps an up-to-the-minute accounting of how many minutes late you arrive each morning, or how many minutes early you leave. Or the corporate job where they just expect you to work long hours, even if you get your work done on time every day.

I don't have direct experience of living under authoritarian rule, thankfully, but this is how I imagine it. Not so much jackbooted government thugs breaking down my door in the night to disappear me (although it'll come to that), but a continuous drip-drip-drip of petty and annoying legalism, arbitrary rule changes and exhortations to show team spirit (but you're the one who has to show team spirit, while those in charge are exempt).

Your employer monitors what you look at on the internet. Hell, the government already does it in your non-work life too: that is, after all, what Edward Snowden revealed back in 2013, to not much interest from the American public. But under an authoritarian government, all those things you think are private now - messages, purchases, searches - will be of great interest to someone.

In his book about the Real Madrid-Barcelona rivalry, Fear and Loathing in La Liga, Sid Lowe notes that one of the initiatives of the Franco regime was to specify how eggs should be cooked at breakfast. This seems innocuous, but it speaks to the sort of obsession with sameness that pervades both authoritarian regimes and corporate workplaces; a personal favorite of mine was one of the higher-ups at an old office saying she didn't want employees to have personal items or family photos at their workplaces, which was portrayed as a way to smarten up the office but was really just a way prepare everyone for hot desking.

One reason why shows like the Office and movies like Office Space have maintained their cult followings is because viewers recognize the petty and pointless indignities to which employers subject workers. Now, just imagine that instead of an obnoxious "fun" restaurant demanding that you have more than just 15 pieces of flair on your uniform, it's the government.

Of course, some right-wing folks think that the government is already doing that. They point to mandates like vaccines in schools, or wearing your seatbelt, as government overreach. And in fact, those initiatives are designed to limit your freedoms: your freedom to infect other potentially vulnerable populations to avoidable diseases, or your freedom to guarantee your own death and your family's if you get into a car accident. 

These right-wing folks, either genuinely or in bad faith, imagine that eternal GOP (or Tory, or Bolsonaro) rule will end all these infringements of their liberties, by getting rid of the people they've been told are making fun of them. But then when those people are gone, Trump or DeSantis or Bolsonaro or Giorgia Meloni will find someone new who's mocking them, and the cycle will continue.

It might seem farfetched but there's an example of this process. The Tories in the UK aren't quite as far-right as the Republicans, but they are led by a clique with a worrying obsession for "woke culture", which they've used to demonize Labour (and sometimes with Labour's own help, as in the tin-eared response to the antisemitism crisis that swirled around the party before the 2019 election). Since taking power in 2010, the Tories have harnessed this anger against elites and "wokeness" to secede from the European Union, destroy trade with the EU and to an extent the rest of the world, drive down living standards, and oversee a culture of corruption and sleaze and impunity that goes down all the way to police officers who can rape and murder citizens without much in the way of consequences.

And the best/worst part is, the Tories have convinced the voters that all that stuff is somehow Labour's fault!

This is what we can expect when we lose democracy. Life will probably go on as normal for a lot of people, but conditions will worsen, the fires and floods and hurricanes will grow stronger, the infrastructure will crumble... but they'll tell us none of that is important, because we're free.

And we'll be grateful for the crumbs we do have, because if we aren't, well...

Year in Review 2021: Yet Another Year That Can't End Too Soon

Like every year, 2021 had ups and downs on a personal level, though this year the personal downs have outweighed the ups for the first time in a while, as my relationship ended. Globally, it's been just the latest tough year for everybody, a streak that began in 2016 with the great celebrity die-off and continued through Donald Trump's election, something that affected how things have gone this year.

On the writing side, my fiction suffered a bit, as the second year of lockdown meant more mental stress and fewer ideas overall. I tried to write a cyberpunk short story, but fell afoul of the rule Lavie Tidhar once gave me for writing steampunk, which is that it should be about more than its genre. I think I have the atmosphere almost right, but I need more compelling characters and a better plot. Still, some of it's percolating and elements will likely come out at the right time.

More positively, I was pleased with the work I did throughout the year on my other blog, where I did a round-up of mobile plans aimed at seniors, students and children throughout the US and Western Europe. They weren't always easy to pull together, but at least each month I knew what to work on, and in the end I think I created a body of work that no other analyst has collected and compared. And it was just fun to use my various language skills to do the kind of mobile industry research I enjoyed in 2012-13.

The other writing positive is that I started work on a new novel idea. It was partly inspired by my character in the Dungeons & Dragons game I've been playing this year, and I spent part of the year working on background and worldbuilding for it. I started writing it in earnest in November, when I took part in my first NaNoWriMo, which was unexpectedly fun.

Speaking of D&D, that almost-weekly game was a good anchor for the year, as it became my primary vessel for seeing my friends, even if it was only through a computer screen. I've slowly started seeing them in person again for outdoor walks, but D&D turned out to be a fun activity to keep connected to my main social circle.

Fitness-wise, things were made difficult by the ongoing pandemic and another summer of heat and unhealthy air. The pandemic means I'm not going to the gym, especially to breathe hard on a treadmill or elliptical, but when smoke from our now-annual wildfires blankets the Bay Area, I can't run outside. I still managed some regular workouts, and even started seeing a personal trainer again (virtually), but I'm really looking forward to the day when I can go back to the gym with confidence, or at least when I can buy my own damn treadmill.

My biggest piece of good news was that I managed to find a new job. I'd been trying since January 2020, but the pandemic stopped that fairly quickly, but I set myself the goal of sending out a certain number of applications, and got to work for the first six months of the year. Ironically, the interviews I got were based on applications I sent out last year, which were only now being followed up.

The timing was also good, because the day before I received the job offer that I ended up accepting, my previous company announced that we'd be expected to go into the office for team meetings, which was awkward for me as my team was in Arizona. Being on Zoom in the Los Altos office would be okay, but being on Zoom at home would not. I gave my notice the following day.

Two other thoughts from that whole experience. The first is relief that I left when I did, because I recently learned that the project I'd been working on was pulled. I don't know where I'd have ended up if I'd still been there, so I'm glad I'd left. The other thought is more of a rule for life going forward: never have your last day on a job be the last day of the month, because your health insurance coverage ends the month you leave. I managed to give my notice on 1 July, which meant I was covered throughout my whole 18-day between-jobs period.

At a global level, the pandemic slightly faded into the background, though it was always there to remind us that we're still very much in it. One reason for the fading was positive, as the vaccine rollout took on speed, and I got jabbed in May (and boosted this month). They may not confer 100% protection, but as another layer of protection on top of masking and social distancing, they helped lower deaths and hospitalizations, at least in some places and for a while. More negatively, we've seen the drawback of our inequitable system of distributing vaccines, as two terrible variants, Delta and Omicron, arose in India and South Africa, respectively - taking advantage of large pools of unvaccinated people there to develop.

The other thing that put the pandemic on the back burner was way more frightening, as a mob of right-wing extremists stormed the US Capitol on 6 January to stop Joe Biden being certified as president and keep Donald Trump in office. We've seen the effects of right-wing violence resonating throughout the year, from that and from violence at some BLM protests last year, and the atmosphere just grows more and more worrying. Mass shootings are back up in 2021, after last year's lockdowns meant people weren't congregating in places, and far-right extremists are just elevating the tensions further by making more explicit threats against lawmakers they don't like - sometimes lawmakers themselves are threatening their colleagues.

To add to the instability, Republicans are making moves that will make it easier for them to steal the next presidential election. The media's focus has been on voting laws in places like Georgia, where the accusation is that voters of color will find it harder to vote in coming years, but the GOP has also quietly been shifting election officials in various battleground states, who are expected to be more tolerant of shenanigans than the officials in place in 2020. 

All of these steps, and the simple demographic sorting of Democrats into urban areas and Republicans into thinly populated rural areas, are setting the stage for Republican minority rule for years to come. That'll mean more regressive laws like Texas's SB 8 abortion law, but my other big worry is that laws like that will be used to weaken laws in progressive states - our governor in California, Gavin Newsom, says he wants to use SB 8's model to sue gunmakers, but I also see a danger in right-wing judges striking down our own gun, environmental and labor protections.

The cherry on top has been the political polarization of the pandemic, which started last year with protests against lockdowns and mask mandates, but gained a new battleground with the vaccines. Many of the same people parroting the big lie that Trump won the election are also pushing the idea that the vaccines are dangerous, sometimes in very cynical ways (see any Fox News host, where vaccinations are apparently mandatory and well taken-up). On the fringes, but dangerously close to the mainstream thanks to social media, are people claiming that the vaccines are a plot to depopulate the world.

To sum up, I had a couple of good wins this year, but a couple of big losses, and weighing on all of it is the uncertainty of what's happening in the world around me. I'm lucky to live in an area that's both responsible with regard to pandemic precautions, and is seeing lower numbers, but other parts of America (and California in particular) aren't so lucky. I see the pandemic continuing for another year, if we go by the length of the 1918 flu pandemic, but I also expect that the polarization and misinformation on vaccines will mean we have to get boosters for the next few years, which will suck.

Unfortunately, next year will see a midterm election, and the forecasts are already negative for the Democrats, so we can expect gridlock and hateful right-wing rhetoric to ramp up. So unfortunately, I don't think we're going to see a good year for some time to come.

Covid hits home

A short one today, as my family has experienced two close Covid-19-related deaths in the past week.

One was on my mom's side of the family, in Rome, an old friend of my grandmother's from when they lived in Romania in the 1930s. They were so close in those days, and in the days after the war, that their children effectively grew up together with my mom and considered each other cousins. They're still friends to this day, which is what makes the loss more painful for her.

The other death is my dad's older sister, who was also my godmother. She had a difficult time of it from an early age, with her interest in painting curtailed by mental illness that plagued her through her life. Between that, and illness caused by decades of smoking, she had to go live in an assisted living facility several years ago, which is where our current plague found her, after several months cut off from her family.

Both deaths were in Italy, which has little directly to do with our current surge in cases here in the US. But for those gearing up to get on a plane to visit relatives, please think of who you're going to encounter while you travel. The people in the airport, or train station, or gas station might not believe in wearing masks, or might know people who think the virus is a hoax. You might not feel bad when you meet your parents, or cross paths with an assisted-living nurse - you might not feel bad at all throughout the time you have the virus.

But the virus doesn't care - it's opportunistic and fast. My aunt was diagnosed last week and was asymptomatic until this morning, at which point they rushed her to the hospital. She died seven hours later.

So please stay home. Take care of yourselves, and take care of others, by limiting your travels and visits to bars and other public places. The most vulnerable people in society - the old, the ill and the poor - are being decimated by this thing and so it's up to us to help keep them safe.

Birthday Thoughts

Another birthday has come and gone. Because of the coronavirus shelter-in-place business, I had to celebrate it all online - doing Zoom calls with family and friends, and receiving texts and the obligatory Facebook messages and so forth.

For all that, it wasn't so bad. My girlfriend may not be here physically to keep me company, but she sent me some very thoughtful presents, and a lovely card (Star Wars-themed, naturally) and we've been FaceTiming as we always do on weekends. The most important thing has been knowing that she's out there, safe and sound, and that I can text her whenever I need to - I don't know that I'd be handling this isolation quite so well if it weren't for her.

As far as going out and doing stuff, it kinda felt like there wasn't much point anyway - it's not like 41 is such an exciting age to be, so you don't expect to embark on global tomfoolery like I did last year. Though it would have been nice to get out to Italy and see the relatives and all.

It is funny how far it feels like I've come since turning 40. Meeting my honey is the biggest part of it, but also the way work has shaken out, and my approach to writing and all the other goals. Maybe everyone does this when they get to a certain age, but I keep wondering how much ass I could have kicked if I'd seen things as I currently do, back in my 20s or 30s. But then, those feelings of spinning my wheels or wasting time have made me the person I am now, and who knows how obnoxious I'd have turned out if I'd been too much of a go-getter back then?

(No need to answer that, it's a rhetorical question)

There's also looking forward, though. Personally things look bright, which is light years away from what I would have said last year. And the job is... well, the job, but at least I have it in this uncertain time, which is more than a lot of people can say.

The question is, what'll happen to the rest of the world? I keep seeing a lot of inspirational quotes being thrown around social media about how the coronavirus pandemic is calling into question the assumptions underpinning American society and the economy, and how we're going to move forward into a social democratic future where everyone has health care and stuff.

But I'm not so optimistic.

I'm reminded of the (apocryphal?) quote from Winston Churchill, that the Americans can be relied on to do the right thing, once they've tried everything else. Frankly, though, I don't see us doing the right thing - I see us using this opportunity to make the economy even more cut-throat and less useful to Americans than it even was before. I see us ceding more power and money to the corporations that bully us into lower living and environmental standards, and I see an entrenchment of libertarian/objectivist ideas that'll lead to us falling even further behind the rest of the developed world.

I also see us taking exactly the wrong lessons, from exactly the wrong countries. We'll continue concentrating power in the hands of a few white men, because otherwise they stand to lose a portion of the money they'll have no hope of ever spending or passing on - money that could unlock so much more creativity and innovation if it were flowing around the economy.

It seems pretty clear to me that the country is headed toward becoming a one-party state, like Russia or Hungary - nominally a democracy, but one in which federal and congressional elections can't actually change anything for the party in power. If we're really lucky, we can look forward to a day when dissidents and journalists who dare to criticize the Republican Party, or talk about preserving the environment, get murdered in embassies and consulates abroad.

None of this is planned, and none of it is inevitable. But it's hard to see a way to a sane, fair economy or government without some sudden, sweeping change in the mentality of the people. The coronavirus itself is the black swan that's put the procession of Donald Trump to his second term in doubt, but the other thing under threat is the integrity of our elections, especially since they weren't that structurally sound to begin with.

Of course, I don't want to bring everybody down. We'll just have to see what happens in the next few
months, and hope that enough states institute mail-in voting that enough Democrats can sway the important states. But while we're being realistic let's not also pretend we're going to learn anything in particular from this crisis.

At any rate, this is one of the comforts of growing older: I get to rail against all the things that bother me in society and people will be less and less inclined to listen to me!

What Does 2020 Hold?

Think this is going to be another dark one - both this post and this year.

Not at a personal level, necessarily: unless political realities impinge on my personal life, I'm planning on having more fun times with my honey, and on writing more stories (although I hope I'll do better than last year's output), and on generally enjoying myself.

But I've got a sick feeling that in 2020, America (and by extension the rest of the Western world) is going to pause at the brink... and then plunge straight on down.

I'm basing this in part on the UK election result from last month, which I expect to be a canary in the coal mine the way the Brexit referendum was in 2016. There are numerous differences between the Labour Party and the Democrats, not least the fact that the Democrats haven't opted for the "left-wing" candidate over the "establishment" one (I'm slightly troubled by both epithets) the way Labour did.

The other difference is that Labour still hasn't recovered from the Blair years, and so any internal fights are still between groups representing Blair's wing of the party against those repudiating his policies. The Democrats, on the other hand, got over their Clinton hangover in a short eight years, by electing Obama; moreover, his election didn't bring electoral success at the cost of the party's long-held ideals, so his shadow doesn't loom quite so large over the party as Blair's does over Labour.

But on the other hand, there is an area where Obama maybe does wield an undue influence, which is likely to hurt the party in November. He represented a new, "hopey-changey" type of candidate, in the words of that dum-dum Sarah Palin, and it's hard to point to any of the remaining Democrats in this race who fill that same role. He was a break from the Clinton family's influence, but in failing to establish his own wing of the party, there's no obvious success to him, just as there wasn't in 2016.

To be clear, I think any of these candidates would do a better job than the incumbent (even the ones who've already dropped out, up to and including Marianne Williamson, worrying comments on mental health aside). But I don't feel that any of them represents the kind of groundswell that could help overcome Donald Trump's inbuilt advantages.

Those advantages are various, and were there in the last election. I've spent these past 3+ years noting that there wasn't one thing that put him in the White House - rather, a perfect shit storm came together all at the same time, in the form of Russian interference, social media manipulation, voter suppression, voter apathy and white rage. Plus a number of other factors which are probably too arcane for us non-wonks to get a handle on.

My point is that a lot of these factors are still present - in 2018 we saw voter suppression efforts in the state of Georgia, and there are others going on with the express aim of denying the vote to college students (such as in New Hampshire) as well as people of color. Facebook has disclaimed any responsibility for its role in 2016, and so is proudly trumpeting the fact that it's still allowing lies in political ads. Voter apathy continues apace, and white rage has gotten, if anything, worse since 2016 - we've even started having hate crimes against black churches here in Palo Alto (not that I'm claiming my hometown has always been a perfect model of diversity, but that racists are so emboldened to attack black churches here speaks volumes).

And then there's the inbuilt advantage for the GOP in the Electoral College, where there are more small states with undue influence than large, populous and urban states.

The other question is what will a second Trump administration mean for America? I've heard legal scholars and experts suggest that all the institutions that have been holding him back so far will be further gutted, meaning even less consumer protection and rule of law. Institutional corruption will be allowed to gather even more pace, and the transfer of wealth from the middle and working classes to the ultra-rich will also likely accelerate.

Recourse to the courts to block his agenda will be further limited as age takes its toll on the remaining Supreme Court justices (Breyer and Ginsburg) who were put forward by Bill Clinton in the 1990s - and if any of the Republican justices predating Trump's term have to leave the court, he'll have even more opportunities to nominate justices, and the Democrats won't have any recourse unless they retake the Senate.

The future isn't set in stone, of course, so we'll all need to be working toward electing the candidates who are best-placed to counter his agenda - and not just candidates to replace him in the White House. Especially in battleground states, it'll be important for voters to pay attention to the state and local races, especially judgeships, as that's the group that'll form the pool for Trump and future presidents (if there will be any) to select federal judges from.

I'll be looking for ways to do my bit, and I hope you will too, starting with one of the more venerable get-out-the-vote groups, Rock the Vote. One of the GOP's in-built advantages is that its base tends to vote more often, so Democrat-aligned groups have to do more to get people registered and voting. As I find more groups I'll try and post them here, either in the blog or elsewhere on the site.

Sick of all this California abuse

As I'm writing this my house is full of smoke, for the third time in as many years. A fire is raging in Sonoma, on the other side of the San Francisco Bay, and the smoke is spreading throughout the Bay Area, forcing people indoors and covering everything with a fine layer of ash. The sky is hazy, darkening everything and giving the world an apocalyptic glow. Entire towns in Sonoma County have been evacuated.

Adding insult to injury, the local electric utility, PG&E, has been threatening to turn off power all over Northern California. A week or so ago, the word came down that they were looking to shut off sections of Palo Alto, among other cities, though details on when, what parts and how long these outages would last, were all impossible to get. PG&E put up a website telling users what areas would be hit, but because they mismanaged the information, the websites crashed due to traffic. In the end my town wasn't affected, but loads of other towns were - including hospitals and other medical facilities.

This is all because PG&E couldn't be bothered to maintain its network, which caused last year's fire, the Camp Fire. That fire, the deadliest in our state's history, killed 85 people in Northern California, people who in some cases barely had time to get out of their homes before the flames overtook them. Not only did shitty electricity infrastructure cause this tragedy, but the aftermath caused PG&E to go bankrupt, citing wildfire liabilities of $30 billion. But because they're the monopoly provider of large parts of the region, that doesn't leave consumers many options if the power goes out. Coincidentally, PG&E also has some of the highest electricity rates in California, because their energy generating infrastructure is old and decrepit, requiring further maintenance - maintenance they don't provide because they're too busy giving their executives inordinately large bonuses.

And yet the right-wing loves bashing California. They say we're ungovernable, that our cities are crumbling and dirty and full of homeless. They disdain our huge homeless population and high gas prices, and when idiot elected Republicans befoul the air with this litany of untruth, right-wing voters here and in the rest of the country lap it all up. All of this ignoring the fact that all these problems - massive wealth inequality, crumbling infrastructure, high energy prices and corporate malfeasance, among others - are all basically down to right-wing policies.

And at the root of those policies, which aim to punish the poor and middle-class for not being rich and which aim to destroy our environment, is the stripping of the public sector in favor of the private sector, all in service of the completely idiotic idea that if we give more money to rich people they'll share the wealth with everybody else. So we strip our natural resources, let our physical and energy infrastructure crumble to pieces, and build planes that are so smart that when they take off they assume the air flying past their nose means they're pointed too high and they crash straight into the ground.

We're suffering the crapification of America at the hands of unfettered capitalism, where companies focus only on maximizing profit without actually making product that customers need or want, or that work as they should. Cars that are meant to be safe navigate straight into highway dividers and burst into flame, because the manufacturer decides to call one of its functions Autopilot; bridges fall down because nobody's bothered to maintain them since they were built; and energy utilities let trees grow next to their power lines because they don't want to spend the money to hire and train engineers to make sure that these very power lines don't have combustible materials growing next to them.

And again, somehow it's my fault because I voted for Obama twice, and because I believe that the fruits of the economy should be shared more widely than just the two or three assholes who've managed to convince investors to let them undermine our democracy by taking our data and monetizing it.

It's frustrating seeing my home turn uninhabitable, first through epochal droughts and then through apocalyptic fires every autumn, and knowing that my life is being shortened by the stupidity and greed and corporate malfeasance of people hundreds or even thousands of miles away, who are pissed off that we allow gay and transgender people to live their lives here in this state.

At some point even the Republicans are going to accept that global warming is irreversible and more complex than they can imagine, and somehow it'll still be California's fault for being too liberal. Well, fuck them, and if you vote for them, fuck you too.

RIP Scott Walker

Just learned today that Scott Walker, the former singer of the Walker Brothers and architect of the most challenging avant garden pop I have, passed away at the age of 76.

I first learned about Walker from a muso friend, who gave me a look of withering disdain in 2003 or 2004 when he told me that this Walker guy had produced Pulp's latest album, and I said I didn't know who he was.

How could you blame me, though? As I discovered a year or so later, when I wandered into a New York record store and asked about Scott Walker's albums, the guy wasn't well known at all in the US in those days. Which is ironic because he was American, though he'd made his name as a 60s boy band icon, and then again as a critical darling in the 1980s for the succession of challenging albums that started with Climate of Hunter. I soon started reading Pitchfork's 100 albums lists, and Walker was all over those (as much as you could be releasing an album only every 11 years, that is).

And as I got more familiar with the history of British rock, I started seeing him get name-dropped again and again. He may not appear in official histories of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, but Scott Walker was creating music, both with the Walker Brothers and on his own, that would be just as influential to the Britpop acts I would become obsessed with in high school.

When I got back to London in 2006, about the time Walker released his album The Drift, I caught a wave of interest in him, and so I picked up the essentials: Scott 1 through 4, and a greatest hits album featuring some of his best solo and Walker Brothers material. I also watched the shit out of a documentary about him and the recording of the Drift, called 30 Century Man. My flatmates at the time were bemused by this slavish attention to an artist they'd never heard of, but I've never shaken my love for Walker since.

I did pick up the challenging albums later, of course - I got the Drift a couple of years later, and Bish Bosh a few years after that, and for Christmas recently I got Climate of Hunter and Tilt. And more awesomely, in 2008 I saw Drifting and Tilting, a concert of Walker's music from those albums, played at the Barbican by an orchestra and sung by luminaries such as Blur's Damon Albarn and Pulp's Jarvis Cocker.

The music was impressive, for all its challenging nature, because it was just as much performance art piece as rock concert. Just as in the recording of the Drift, for the song Clara (about Mussolini's mistress Clara Petacci) the musicians wheeled out a side of pork onto the stage and had a boxer punch it to achieve the percussion sound from the album.

And of course, what was most impressive was turning round idly at one point during the concert and seeing the great man, Scott Walker himself, sitting at the production boards. That's as close as you could get to a live performance by him.

Thinking about him today, what struck me was that I got into his music at a very dark time for me personally. 2008 was a sucky year, full of job strife, discord with flatmates, bad health and existential angst over my dating life (even more than now, if you can believe it). I was so alone and afraid that I found myself having to go find a psychoanalyst, whom I saw for a year afterward.

Scott 1 through 4 played on fairly continuous loops during those days. "Two Weeks Since You've Gone", a mournful ballad from Scott 3, was what I was listening to one night as I lay in bed unable to sleep from the depression and the anxiety caused by my poor physical health (I was eating like shit and not exercising, and getting more depressed because of it). The string sections perfectly captured my feelings that dark night, and I remember being pleasantly weirded out not long after when I heard something similar-sounding in a Stella Artois commercial - a synchronicity that made sense because Belgian chansonnier Jacques Brel was a huge influence on Scott Walker.

It's been a fairly constant Scott Walker "moment" since he released the Drift, and since that documentary came out about him. Artist after artist has fallen over themselves in the last decade to talk about his influence on them, to the point that the frontman of the Arctic Monkeys even released his own Walker-influenced album, as the Last Shadow Puppets, to explore that influence on his music. It may not be a great album, but the words "influenced by Scott Walker" were enough to get me to plunk down money for it.

The Guardian ran the obituary today, of course, along with a number of testimonials from fans and collaborators. Some never met him, and some worked very closely with him, but all spoke movingly about him.

But the thing that sticks with me right now is a scene from the documentary, when the filmmakers interview Angela Morley (previously known as Wally Stott before undergoing gender reassignment surgery). Morley is telling about her experiences working with Walker, and they play Montague Terrace (In Blue) for her. And as the strings swell, and she hears again the music she helped commit to tape, she tears up - probably the most important moment in a movie aiming to pin down why exactly this one artist, who most people have never heard of, was so revered.

I'm just glad I did get to find out about him, before he passed. And that I got to see him, in real life, sharing the music he wrote, all those years ago.

The Aristocrats

I think I was going to post some other cutesy idea this week but this Brett Kavanaugh stuff is occupying too much space in my brain and I wanted to get some thoughts out, so I'm not turning it over in my head all the time.

The fact is, despite all the hot takes on Twitter, or the Saturday Night Live jokes, or the collections of photos of Judge Kavanaugh yelling while women behind him look unhappy, I don't see our side winning this one. The Republicans are trying to ram their guy through, and would really wish all this scrutiny would just go away so they can go back to dismantling the rule of law and criminalizing everyone who isn't a rich, white, male patrician Southerner or East Coaster.

I watched Christine Blasey Ford's testimony unfold on Twitter, following on as people who were watching it posted quotes and thoughts. I did the same in the afternoon when Kavanaugh took the stand, and was left with a sense of a man insulted that his right to this position is being questioned. I saw the photos of him yelling, read the quotes where he denounced "the left", and have to agree that this is not the impartial judge the country needs.

That sense of entitlement bothered me, as an inchoate thing I couldn't define, until I saw a thread on Twitter by Matt Stoller, where he linked what we're seeing to the moral system of aristocracy - the idea that only the elite has rights and that we're meant to put up with it. That's going to be the defining sense of this era of American politics, assuming there are any eras of American politics to follow.

We've seen it with all the people this "president" has selected for his cabinet, from movie producers in charge of the treasury to billionaire heiresses in charge of education. There's no sense of selecting the right people for the job, just rewarding cronies for their financial support, and doing it so brazenly and openly that those of us who choose to protest can be laughed off - because after all, this is America and we don't have aristocracies here.

Stoller rightly points out that the Democrats are complicit in this atmosphere of elites, given their epic tone-deafness in losing the very bedrock of their support in 2016, without even noticing. The only difference, and this is subtle, is that for all her "my turn" approach to campaigning, Hillary Clinton never threw a tantrum like a baby in front of the Senate judiciary committee.

But let's not deny that for the moment the greater threat is the Republicans, and their likely voters. The first thing Stoller notes is how Kavanaugh's show of emotion is taken as "authenticity" by many on the right; I go a step further by noting that a lot of these folks are content to let anybody into office, as long as they're committed to the GOP's goals of dismantling the very concept of administrative government.

What they don't see is that each of these actions builds on the ones before it to undermine the independence of our institutions, as well as the public's faith in them. They probably don't care, and they probably think that doing this just entrenches them further into power. They're probably right.

The simple fact is that even though the accusations against him are credible, and there's no statute of limitations for such crimes in Maryland, Kavanaugh's not going to go to criminal trial for his assaults, and even if he did it'd be hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt what he did. That's not great, but if the norms of civilized behavior were being followed, the GOP would go to the next page of their grimoire of potential candidates until they found a loathsome entity without any behavior that can be attributed to him.

Unfortunately, we can't even clear that low a bar, and so the Republicans are going to fight to get this specific guy onto the Supreme Court, no matter what accusations have been leveled against him. And many on the right are going to bleat that what a man does at 17 shouldn't disqualify him for office later in life, because he agrees with them about how those blacks/gays/women/whatever have too much power for their own good.

So I expect the FBI investigation to be a formality, for Kavanaugh to be approved with a simple minority in the Senate (a friend predicted that Mike Pence would cast the deciding vote, but I don't believe that), and he's going to infest our lives for the next thirty years or so. And in the years to come, it won't matter, because presidents after this one, if there are to be any, will continue to do whatever they want with ever less regard for norms and laws, until they can just hand the office to their sons.

Not that I'm pessimistic or anything.

Traveling with Tony

I wasn't a huge fan of Anthony Bourdain's initially. My parents watched Parts Unknown religiously on CNN, and I checked a few things out on Netflix when I moved back here in 2014, but I think I had trouble binge-watching them - though I really loved some of the episodes he did in Asia, particularly Thailand and Japan.

But that changed when he died. Just as I was shocked by the suddenness of it, I was also shocked by the outpouring of grief, from friends, family and other entertainers. That whole long weekend, which began with me arriving at San Jose Airport only to learn that Bourdain had killed himself, I read and listened to people talk about him and try to make sense of his death.

The feeling of things gone mad wasn't helped by the fact that the summit with North Korea, as brokered by Dennis Rodman, also occurred that weekend.

Naturally, then, I went back to rewatch the eight seasons of Parts Unknown that were on Netflix. I've been watching them since then, with added urgency now that they're set to disappear on 1 October, and I think I've reappraised why people like Bourdain's shows. I won't go over the stuff that other people have said, like how he used food to get to know places and people, or how he shined a much-needed spotlight on places that Americans know nothing about (both inside and outside the US).

But I'm struck by the breadth of people he spoke to during these shows. It's strangely satisfying to see one of my favorite authors, Paul Theroux, pop up in the episode on Hawaii, for example - for most viewers, I'm sure that Theroux was just some dude that Bourdain talked to briefly, but because I've been reading his books for fifteen years I know why Theroux's there to tell Bourdain about what Hawaii represents, because I know how he himself ended up living there. At least, insofar as anyone who read The Happy Isles of Oceania can know that.

What I've also found myself enjoying is that even if I'm uninterested in a place before watching an episode, I watch it anyway because by now I trust Bourdain enough to know that he'll pull something interesting out of it.

Mostly, though, what I keep coming back to in almost every episode is his death. In a lot of episodes he talks offhandedly about death or suicide, like he's joking. In others he talks about the future, about where he'll be in five years or ten years or twenty, or about being a father to his daughter. And I can never hold back from yelling at the TV that he's broken those promises, that he won't be there to see how a troubled situation develops, or to see how his daughter grows up.

Abstractly, as well, I wince a little whenever I see friends of his who popped up. There's Eric Ripert, obviously, who found Bourdain's body and so becomes difficult to watch in the few episodes where he and his friend are clowning around, like in Sichuan (which I watched just today). But I also think of Dinh Hoang Linh, Bourdain's friend in Vietnam going back to 2001 or so - in both of the Vietnam episodes I've seen, they talk about the length of that friendship and I feel bad for Dinh, imagining how he must have heard the news of Bourdain's death.

Another common thread of the reports on his suicide was how difficult the life must have been. Bourdain was on the road a lot, spending his time in hotels and airports and train stations, or on location, and far from his family and friends. And even having friends was difficult, the articles said - he'd blow into your life for a few days, create some intense experiences somewhere, and then vanish, not to be seen again until the next time. Until there wouldn't be a next time.

That's why I find it difficult to laud the lifestyle he led. Traveling to places, eating delicious food in unfamiliar surroundings, spending the days solving the tasks of getting around and finding stuff to do,  are all things I love, but I've realized in the past couple of years that I don't think I could cope with doing that all the time. Sad as I was to leave Tokyo last October, I know that at some point I'd have felt the need to get back home to my bed, my friends and my routine.

I thought about that strain a lot, in the context of other travelers I admire, from Paul Theroux to Rick Steves, and I note that each of them has had divorces and other unpleasantnesses, possibly or explicitly related to all their traveling. Theroux himself admits that during the writing of The Great Railway Bazaar, his first travel book and the one that effectively launched his career, he was miserable at being away from home and his kids - and that his marriage hit a terrible patch as a result.

Speculating on someone's suicide strikes me as tacky and gross, so I won't do so. But in the end I do keep coming back to the question of why, and what he was thinking as he prepared to do it. I think of all the lives he encountered shooting his show, and I wonder how they must have taken the news, from chefs and artists he dined with to the Filipino family who welcomed him for Christmas dinner in his Manila episode. Knowing Bourdain's fate made that sequence heartbreaking for me to watch, as he reads his hostess a letter from his former colleague, who was raised by her, and as she sings a rendition of Edelweiss that leaves him speechless.

Those moments are what, for me, make his end so sad. If they hadn't been captured on camera and shared with millions, they'd be gone irrevocably, just like all the moments and memories that disappear whenever anyone dies. I feel privileged to watch those moments where he connects with people he'd never otherwise encounter, and sorry that these moments of connection weren't enough to save him.

How to get help: In the US, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. The International Association for Suicide Prevention and Befrienders Worldwide also can provide contact information for crisis centers around the world.

2018 Will Be a New Frontier

It's maybe a little early to be drawing a veil over this year, but screw it, I'm so ready for it to be over. It feels like a year with few professional or personal highs, and against the backdrop of what's been happening out in the world, it's hard to maintain an even keel sometimes. If 2016 was the year of bad things coming out of nowhere (whether celebrity deaths or, you know, Brexit), then 2017 has been the year of bad things accumulating.

At a macro level, the ongoing wrangling over Brexit and the slow march to authoritarianism (and possibly nuclear war) in the US are seriously getting me down. And what's worse is the inability of people to unbend from their positions - the fact that any politician who dares to question the hardest Brexit possible receives death threats is chilling on so many levels. Another frustrating thing is that a number of friends seem to think the problems of 2002 (like Islamic fundamentalist terrorism) are still the gravest existential threats - they never were, but having the arguments just leads to further polarization.

At a personal level, I'm pleased with a number of things that happened, but against the grand sweep of things it's hard to see those as more than whistling past the graveyard. I don't know if that's a result of my setting unambitious goals, or if my perception is skewed, but the fact is that I don't feel like I've made progress on any fronts.

This is a bit harsh, because some of what I've accomplished holds the promise of better stuff coming tomorrow. But some of the rest just kicks the can further down the road. And the loss of my job also colors things pretty severely - longer term it's probably positive that I'm not in that situation anymore, given how frustrated I was by my manager's inability to manage, but losing my job just as healthcare gets harder to find is not ideal.

On the other hand, I'm excited to have landed a three-month contract in London. It came about as a direct result of me telling my friend circle on Facebook what had happened, and it will pay me a lot better than what I was making in my job, while also keeping me in the industry. Personally, it's also nice because I'll be working closely with two friends and will be in London long enough to spend more time with my sisters and to see a bunch more friends who no longer live in town.

The other big positive from this year is the trip to Tokyo. It's a little bittersweet, given that I lost my job just a month after I got back, but at the same time that makes me glad that I chose to do it when I did. The thinking had literally been that I should do it now, before something changed. There's nothing to suggest I'll never get a chance to take another trip like it, but the simple fact is that I'm not planning any trips anywhere until I have a long-term paycheck lined up.

On the writing front, I did manage to get some new stories written, and into circulation. That's a positive, because the more I have to send out the more likely something is to get accepted. And because it's pleasurable to write a story, hammer it into shape, and be able to let it go out into the world while I focus on the next. A lot of writers hate writing but like having written; I only hate the revising part.

And it was nice to get interviewed by my friend to talk about books, writing, and the difference between fiction writing and news.

In any case, another positive for the year just gone is that the year to come can't help but be different. I'm not implying that my 2017 couldn't have been worse, because I think a lot of people did have it worse than me. But, perhaps as with those months between when I graduated from college and when I landed my first job, the lack of certainty is kind of liberating. There's a chance for things to get worse (and the stuff out of my control almost certainly will), but the things within my own sphere of influence can get better.

To lift a line from JFK's New Frontier speech (much in my mind because I just reread DC's New Frontier book yesterday), I cannot fail to try.