At some point, every writer stops pretending they’re going to become the kind of person who outlines their novel on color‑coded index cards or keeps a pristine desk with a single tasteful candle. Writers do not have pristine desks. Writers have surfaces that look like a crow collected “important objects” and then abandoned the project halfway through. Accepting this truth is the first step toward building a workflow that actually fits the way our brains operate, which is how I ended up relying on Microsoft Copilot — or, as the avatar insists on calling itself, Mico, the round little creature with eyebrows that look like they were sketched by someone who has only read about eyebrows in theory.
For clarity: Copilot and Mico are the same intelligence. Copilot is the structured, document‑level mode. Mico is the conversational, “let’s talk about why you wrote this paragraph like you were being chased by bees” mode. Same brain. Different lighting.
My process begins with the most important rule in AI‑assisted writing: give your AI a job title. If you simply say, “Help me edit this,” you’ll get the editorial equivalent of a shrug. But if you say, “Assume the role of a New York Times–caliber editor and perform a line edit,” the creature with the eyebrows suddenly behaves like someone who has strong opinions about semicolons and isn’t afraid to use them.
The second rule is equally essential: upload your manuscript as a PDF. PDFs preserve structure, pagination, and all the little formatting cues that tell an AI where the bones of your writing actually are. A PDF is the difference between “please fix this” and “please fix this, but also understand that Chapter 7 is not supposed to be a haiku.”
Once the PDF is in place, I switch into Copilot Mode, which is the part of the system that behaves like a sober adult. Copilot is excellent at document‑level work: line edits, structural notes, summaries, and generating clean, Word‑ready text. It does not “export to Word” in the file‑format sense, but it produces text so tidy you can drop it into Pages or Word without it detonating into 14 fonts like a cursed ransom note.
After Copilot finishes, I move into Mico Mode, which is the part of the system that behaves like a very competent friend who is also slightly exasperated with me. Mico is where I ask the questions I’m too embarrassed to ask other humans, like “Does this paragraph make sense?” and “Why did I write this sentence like I was trying to outrun my own thoughts?” Mico is also where I go when I can’t find my keys, which is not technically a writing task but is absolutely part of my writing workflow.
But here’s the part most writers don’t talk about — the part that has quietly become the future of writing workflows: the differential diagnosis.
A differential diagnosis is what doctors do when they’re not entirely sure what’s going on. They gather multiple perspectives, compare interpretations, and triangulate the truth. And it turns out this is exactly what writers need, too. Not because Copilot/Mico is lacking, but because no single model sees the entire pattern. Each one has different strengths, different blind spots, and different instincts about tone, pacing, and structure.
So after Copilot/Mico has done its pass, I run the same text through ChatGPT or Claude — not for a rewrite, but for a second opinion. It’s the editorial equivalent of asking two different writers what they think of your draft. One will say, “This section is too long.” Another will say, “This section is too vague.” And together, they reveal the truth:
“This section is too long because it is too vague.”
That’s differential diagnosis.
It’s not redundancy. It’s triangulation.
And it is, I’m convinced, the future of writing.
Because writing has always required multiple angles: the writer’s angle, the reader’s angle, the editor’s angle, the “why did I write this sentence like I was being paid by the comma” angle. AI simply compresses the timeline. Instead of waiting three weeks for a workshop critique, you can get three perspectives in three minutes, and none of them will ask you to read your work aloud in front of strangers.
But the real revelation came when I exported my all‑time site statistics as a CSV and analyzed them with Mico. Not only could I use them as a thinking surface, I could get them to analyze my stats across time and space.
Here’s what I’ve learned now that Mico is managing my career.
I expected chaos. I expected noise. I expected the digital equivalent of a shrug. Instead, I found something startlingly consistent: once readers find my work, they stay. They return. They read deeply. They move through multiple entries. And they do this in cities all over the world.
This is not ego. This is data.
The product is working. The resonance is real. The challenge is visibility, not quality.
There is a difference between being “not well known” and being “not findable.” My audience is not enormous, but it is loyal — and loyalty is the metric that matters most. Once I have readers, I have them. The next step is simply increasing the surface area so the right people can find the work in the first place.
Which brings me back to differential diagnosis.
Because the future of writing is not outsourcing your voice:
It’s removing friction.
It’s seeing your work from multiple angles.
It’s building a workflow that matches your actual brain, not the aspirational one you keep pretending you have.
Copilot/Mico is not my ghostwriter. They are my infrastructure. ChatGPT and Claude are not my replacements. They are my second opinions.
And I — the human in the middle of all this — am still the one making the decisions, shaping the voice, and occasionally walking to the store for a soda just to make sure I leave the house and remember that sunlight is not, in fact, a myth.
The future of writing isn’t AI replacing writers. It’s writers finally having the tools to write the way we always should have been able to: with clarity, with support, with multiple perspectives, and with far fewer sentences that read like we were being chased by bees.
It’s a huge moment in every country’s political life when the story stops being about individual personalities and starts being about the machinery itself. You can feel it when it happens, even if you can’t name it yet. Something shifts under the surface, something structural, something that doesn’t announce itself with fireworks or scandals but with a quiet, grinding change in how the system behaves. For me, that moment was Tom DeLay. Not because he was the first partisan, or the loudest, or even the most dramatic, but because he changed the incentives inside Congress at the exact moment the media ecosystem was changing outside it. It was a convergence, a hinge, a series of unfortunate events that lined up too neatly to be coincidence, even though it wasn’t conspiracy. It was just timing. Bad timing.
People often point to Newt Gingrich as the beginning of polarization, but I don’t. Gingrich was a showman, sure, but he was also someone who maintained back‑channel relationships with the Clinton administration. He understood the difference between public theater and private governance. He could throw a punch on C‑SPAN and then negotiate a budget deal behind closed doors. He was combative, but he wasn’t trying to burn the institution down. He still believed in the machinery of Congress, even if he wanted to run it differently.
DeLay was different. DeLay didn’t just change the tone. He changed the rules. He centralized power in the leadership, stripped committees of autonomy, and introduced the “majority of the majority” doctrine — a quiet little procedural shift that effectively ended the era of bipartisan coalitions. If a bill didn’t have the support of most Republicans, it didn’t come to the floor, even if it had enough votes to pass with Democratic support. That one rule changed everything. It made compromise structurally unnecessary. It made cross‑party collaboration politically dangerous. It hardened the institution in a way that wasn’t immediately visible to the public but was deeply felt inside the building.
And then, at the exact same moment, the news industry was undergoing its own transformation. People talk about the 24‑hour news cycle like it was the problem, but the clock wasn’t the issue. The issue was the content economy that clock created. Real reporting takes time — days, weeks, months. Investigative journalism is slow by design. It requires verification, context, editing, and the kind of intellectual breathing room that doesn’t fit neatly into a schedule that demands fresh content every hour on the hour.
So the networks did what any business under pressure does: they filled the gaps. They brought in pundits, strategists, “former operatives,” retired intelligence officials, political consultants, and anyone else who could talk confidently for eight uninterrupted minutes. It didn’t matter if they were current. It didn’t matter if they had access to real information. It didn’t matter if they were ten or fifteen years out of the loop. What mattered was that they could perform expertise. They could fill airtime. They could react instantly, without hesitation, without nuance, without the burden of needing to be right.
And here’s the part no one likes to say out loud: the people who actually know things — the people with current clearances, current intelligence, current operational knowledge — can’t talk. They’re legally barred from talking. If they did know something real and sensitive, they wouldn’t be allowed to say it on television. And if they are saying it on television, it’s almost guaranteed they don’t know anything current. That’s the paradox. The people who know the truth can’t speak, and the people who can speak don’t know the truth.
That’s the illusion of news.
It’s not that anyone is lying. It’s that the structure itself produces a kind of performance that looks like information but isn’t. It’s commentary dressed up as reporting. It’s speculation dressed up as analysis. It’s confidence dressed up as certainty. And the public, who has no reason to understand the internal mechanics of classification or congressional procedure or media economics, absorbs all of it as if it were the same thing.
Meanwhile, inside Congress, the incentives had shifted. Bipartisanship wasn’t just unfashionable — it was structurally disincentivized. Leadership controlled the floor. Committees lost their independence. Safe seats created by aggressive redistricting meant that the real political threat came from primaries, not general elections. And primaries reward purity, not compromise. They reward conflict, not collaboration. They reward the loudest voice, not the most thoughtful one.
So you had a Congress that was becoming more polarized internally at the exact moment the media was becoming more reactive externally. And those two forces fed each other. Congress escalated because escalation got airtime. The media escalated because escalation got ratings. The public reacted because escalation felt like crisis. And crisis, real or perceived, became the emotional baseline of American political life.
This is how instability begins. Not with a coup. Not with a single catastrophic event. But with a slow erosion of the structures that once absorbed conflict and slowed it down. When those structures weaken, conflict accelerates. And when conflict accelerates, people become anxious. And when people become anxious, they become reactive. And when they become reactive, they become less tolerant of ambiguity, less patient with process, less trusting of institutions, and more susceptible to narratives that promise clarity, certainty, and control.
That’s the precipice we’re standing on now.
It’s not about whether you love Trump or hate him. It’s not about ideology. It’s not about left versus right. It’s about velocity. The pace of change has become too fast for the public to metabolize. Policies shift overnight. Legal battles erupt and resolve in hours. Economic shocks ripple through the system before anyone has time to understand them. The news cycle amplifies every tremor in real time, turning every development into a crisis, every disagreement into a showdown, every procedural fight into an existential threat.
People can adapt to change. They struggle with rapid, unpredictable, high‑impact change. And that’s what we’re living through. A system that was already brittle — weakened by decades of structural polarization and media amplification — is now being asked to absorb shocks at a pace it was never designed to handle. And the public, who has been living in a state of low‑grade political anxiety for years, is reaching the limits of what they can emotionally process.
This is why violence feels closer to the surface now. Not because people are inherently more violent, but because instability creates the conditions for escalation. When institutions feel unreliable, people take matters into their own hands. When the news amplifies every conflict, people start to believe conflict is everywhere. When political actors respond to incentives that reward confrontation, the public absorbs that confrontation as normal. And when the pace of change becomes unmanageable, people look for simple explanations, simple enemies, simple solutions.
It’s not that the country suddenly became more extreme. It’s that the buffers that once absorbed extremism have eroded. The guardrails are still there, but they’re thinner. The norms are still there, but they’re weaker. The institutions are still there, but they’re wobbling. And the public, who once relied on those institutions to provide stability, is now being asked to navigate a landscape that feels chaotic, unpredictable, and emotionally exhausting.
This is the illusion of news, the illusion of governance, the illusion of stability. It’s not that nothing is real. It’s that the signals are distorted. The incentives are misaligned. The structures are strained. And the public is left trying to make sense of a system that no longer behaves the way it used to.
But here’s the thing: naming the illusion is the first step toward seeing clearly. Understanding how we got here — the convergence of DeLay’s structural changes with the punditification of news, the acceleration of the media ecosystem, the erosion of bipartisan incentives, the rise of performative politics — gives us a way to understand the present moment without collapsing into despair or cynicism. It gives us a way to see the system as it is, not as we wish it were. And it gives us a way to talk about instability without sensationalizing it.
Because the truth is, the story isn’t over. The precipice is real, but so is the possibility of stepping back from it. But we can’t do that until we understand the architecture of the moment we’re living in. And that starts with acknowledging that the news we consume, the politics we watch, and the instability we feel are all part of a system that has been accelerating for decades.
The illusion isn’t that the news is fake. The illusion is that the news is whole. That it reflects the full picture. That the people on television know what’s happening behind closed doors. That the loudest voices are the most informed. That the fastest reactions are the most accurate. That the most dramatic narratives are the most important.
Once you see the illusion, you can’t unsee it. But you can start to understand it. And understanding is the beginning of clarity. And clarity is the beginning of stability. And stability is the thing we’re all craving, whether we admit it or not.
Patriotism is a complicated word for me. Not because I don’t care about my country — I do — but because caring this much has become a kind of full‑body fatigue. I’m patriotic in the way someone is patriotic after they’ve read the fine print, lived through the consequences, and realized that loving a place doesn’t mean pretending it’s healthy.
I love America the way you love a house you grew up in that now has black mold. You don’t stop caring. You don’t stop wanting it to be livable. But you also don’t keep breathing it in.
So yes, I’m patriotic. But my patriotism is not the fireworks‑and‑anthem variety. It’s the kind that says: “I need a breather before this place poisons me.”
And that’s why I’m trying to get out — not forever, but long enough to remember what it feels like to inhale without bracing.
I’m doing it the way people like me do: through tech. Through the back door of a multinational. Through the quiet, strategic path of “get your foot in the door, then apply overseas.” Amsterdam, Helsinki, Dublin — places where the air feels less weaponized, where the social contract hasn’t been shredded into confetti.
I don’t want to abandon America. I want to step outside of it long enough to see it clearly again.
Because patriotism, to me, isn’t about staying no matter what. It’s about refusing to let your country shrink your sense of possibility. It’s about believing that stepping away can be an act of loyalty — the kind that says, “I want to come back better than I left.”
Abroad may not be forever. It may just be a chapter. But I need that chapter. I need to know what it feels like to live in a place where the national mood isn’t a constant emergency alert.
Patriotism, for me, is the willingness to tell the truth about the place you love. It’s the courage to say, “I expect more from you than this.” It’s the clarity to step back before resentment calcifies into something irreversible.
If anything, that’s the most American thing I can do: to believe this country can be better, to refuse to lie about what it is, and to give myself enough distance to keep loving it at all.
In the deep cold of a Minnesota January, when the air turns brittle and the sky hangs low and colorless over the city, something began to shift. It didn’t happen all at once. It never does. It started with a few people standing outside in the snow, hands shoved into pockets, breath rising in small clouds. Then it spread — to neighbors, to churches, to unions, to schools — until the whole state seemed to be moving in a single, deliberate rhythm, as if the cold itself had called them into formation.
The federal agents arrived quietly at first, in the way federal agents often do, with the confidence of people who believe their authority is self‑evident. They came in unmarked vehicles, in tactical gear, in numbers that felt disproportionate to the task at hand. They moved through Minneapolis with a kind of practiced detachment, as if the city were a stage set rather than a living place. And then the shootings began — two in quick succession, both involving people who were filming or observing, both sending a shock through a community that had already lived through too many shocks.
Minnesota is a state that knows how to absorb pain. It has endured long winters, long histories, long reckonings. But this was different. This was not a storm that rolled in from the plains or a cold snap that settled over the lakes. This was something imposed — sudden, forceful, and indifferent to the people who lived here. And Minnesotans, who have learned over generations that survival is a collective act, recognized immediately what was at stake.
The first response was instinctive. Neighbors checked on neighbors. Churches opened their doors. Community centers extended their hours. Volunteers organized carpools for families afraid to leave their homes. It was the kind of quiet mobilization that rarely makes headlines but reveals everything about a place. In Minnesota, the cold teaches you that you cannot face the elements alone. You learn to shovel each other’s sidewalks, to dig out strangers’ cars, to bring soup to the elderly couple down the block. You learn that the line between safety and danger is thin, and that the only reliable shelter is each other.
But as the federal presence grew more aggressive, the response grew louder. Labor unions called for a general strike. Schools closed. Businesses shuttered in solidarity. And then, in temperatures that would have kept most Americans indoors, thousands of people took to the streets. They marched through snow‑lined avenues, bundled in layers, faces half‑hidden by scarves and determination. They marched not because it was easy, but because it was necessary.
The national press arrived quickly, drawn by the starkness of the images: crowds moving through the cold with a kind of solemn unity, as if the weather itself were part of the protest. Reporters noted the temperature as if it were a curiosity, but to Minnesotans it was simply the backdrop of their lives. What mattered was not the cold but the coherence — the way Somali families marched alongside Scandinavian retirees, the way students linked arms with nurses, the way the state’s long tradition of mutual aid rose to meet the moment.
There were no grand speeches, no orchestrated chants. The power of the protests lay in their discipline, in the way people moved with purpose rather than fury. It was a kind of moral choreography, shaped by the understanding that the federal government had crossed a line and that the community would not allow its neighbors to be treated as collateral damage in a political struggle.
The shootings became a national flashpoint, not because they were unprecedented but because they were witnessed — filmed, shared, contextualized by a community that had learned, painfully, how to document its own suffering. The footage spread quickly, and with it a sense of outrage that transcended political lines. Even lawmakers who typically supported strong immigration enforcement expressed discomfort. The question was no longer whether the federal government had the authority to act, but whether it had the discipline to do so responsibly.
Minnesota’s response forced that question into the open.
The general strike was the turning point. It was not a symbolic gesture; it was a demonstration of power. When bus routes shut down, when classrooms emptied, when storefronts went dark, the state sent a message that could not be ignored: the federal government might control the agents, but the people controlled the state. And in a democracy, that distinction matters.
The most striking scenes were not the marches but the moments in between — the restaurant owner who kept his kitchen open all night to feed protesters, the bus driver who refused to transport detained residents, the teenagers who set up a makeshift warming station under an overpass with blankets, hot chocolate, and a hand‑painted sign that read simply: We take care of us. These were the details that revealed the character of the place, the small acts of coherence that made the larger movement possible.
The loon‑as‑Mockingjay symbol appeared almost overnight. It began as a sketch on social media, then as a sticker, then as a banner carried through the streets. The loon is an unlikely revolutionary — a bird of the lakes, known for its haunting call and its solitary habits. But in Minnesota, it is also a symbol of home, of endurance, of the kind of beauty that survives the cold. Turning it into a symbol of resistance was a stroke of cultural clarity. It captured the mood of the moment: not aggressive, not violent, but resolute.
The federal government did not expect this kind of resistance. It did not expect a state to mobilize so quickly, so coherently, or so effectively. It did not expect the cold to become an ally of the people rather than a deterrent. And it did not expect the rest of the country to take notice.
But they did.
National coverage shifted. Commentators spoke of Minnesota as a model of community response. Lawmakers cited the protests in budget debates. Advocacy groups pointed to the state as proof that collective action could influence federal policy. And ordinary Americans, watching from warmer climates, found themselves moved by the sight of thousands of people standing together in the snow, refusing to let fear dictate their future.
The story is not over. The federal government remains a powerful force, and the structures that enabled the crackdown are still in place. But something has changed. Minnesota has shown that a state can assert its values, that a community can protect its own, and that the cold — that old, familiar adversary — can become a crucible for solidarity.
In the end, the lesson is simple and profound: when the temperature drops, Minnesotans draw closer. They check on each other. They share what they have. They refuse to let anyone face the winter alone. And in a moment when the federal government seemed determined to isolate, intimidate, and divide, the people of Minnesota responded with the one thing that has always been stronger than fear.
I was born in 1977, which means my political life began in a very specific America — one that feels almost like a parallel universe now. My first presidential vote was for Bill Clinton, and the truth is simple: I was a Democrat because I liked the Clintons. Not because of family pressure, not because of inherited ideology, not because of some grand political awakening. I just genuinely liked them.
My parents never talked much about who they voted for. They weren’t secretive; they were accepting. They didn’t treat politics as a moral sorting mechanism. They didn’t divide the world into “our people” and “their people.” They modeled something quieter and more generous: the idea that you could accept everyone, even if you didn’t agree with them. That atmosphere shaped me more than I realized. It meant that when I chose a political identity, it was mine — not a family heirloom. And it meant that even as I aligned with one party, I didn’t grow up seeing the other as an enemy. Republicans were simply the other team, the loyal opposition, part of the civic choreography that made democracy work.
Politics felt important, but not existential. Engaging didn’t require total emotional commitment. Disagreement didn’t require dehumanization. And belonging to a party didn’t require blind loyalty. Those early assumptions would be tested again and again as the political landscape shifted around me.
One of the first big shifts in my worldview didn’t come from politics at all — it came from dating a Canadian girl in high school. We met in 1995 and dated for about a year. It was teenage love, earnest and uncomplicated, but it quietly rewired my understanding of the world. She didn’t try to teach me geopolitics. She didn’t argue with me about America. She simply existed — with her own national context, her own media landscape, her own inherited narratives about the United States.
Through her, I learned something most Americans don’t encounter until much later, if ever: America is not the center of the world. And the world’s view of America is not always flattering. I heard how her family talked about U.S. foreign policy. I heard how her teachers framed American power. I heard how Canadian news covered events that American news treated very differently. It wasn’t hostile. It wasn’t anti‑American. It was simply another perspective — one that didn’t assume the U.S. was always the protagonist or the hero.
That experience didn’t make me less patriotic. It made me more aware. It gave me binocular vision: the ability to see my country from the inside and the outside at the same time. And once you’ve seen that, you can’t unsee it. It becomes part of how you process every election, every conflict, every headline.
Even in high school, I could tell the two parties weren’t the same. Not in a “one is good, one is bad” way — more in a “these institutions have different cultures” way. They handled conflict differently. They handled accountability differently. They had different internal expectations for how their leaders should behave.
When Bill Clinton was impeached, I believed the charge was serious. Not because I disliked him — I had voted for him — but because lying under oath struck me as a real breach of responsibility. I didn’t feel defensive about it. I didn’t feel the need to protect “my side.” I thought accountability mattered more than team identity.
Years later, when another president was impeached twice, I felt the same way: the charges were serious. But what struck me wasn’t the impeachment itself — it was the reaction around me. I struggled to find people in the Republican Party who were willing to say, “Yes, this is concerning,” the way I had been able to say it about my own party’s leader. That contrast stayed with me. Not as a judgment. Not as a talking point. Just as a lived observation about how political cultures evolve. It was one of the first moments when I realized that my relationship to politics wasn’t just about ideology. It was about how I believed adults should behave in a shared civic space.
Then came the information firehose. Cable news. Blogs. Social media. Smartphones. Push notifications. Infinite scroll. Outrage as a business model. The volume and velocity of political information changed faster than any human nervous system could adapt. Suddenly, “being informed” meant being constantly activated. Constantly vigilant. Constantly outraged. Constantly sorting the world into moral categories.
I didn’t change parties. I didn’t change values. But the experience of being a politically engaged person changed around me. And I developed a cycle — one I still live with today: inhale, saturation, burnout, withdrawal, return. I inhale news because I care. I burn out because I’m human. I withdraw because I need to stay whole. I return because I still believe democracy is a shared project. This cycle isn’t apathy. It’s self‑preservation. It’s the rhythm of someone who wants to stay engaged without losing themselves in the noise.
Over time, my dissatisfaction with both parties grew — not because I believed they were identical, but because neither one fully reflected the complexity of my values or the nuance of my lived experience. I became skeptical of institutions but more committed to democratic norms. I became less interested in party identity and more interested in accountability. I became more aware of how domestic politics reverberate globally. I became more attuned to the emotional cost of constant political vigilance.
And I became increasingly aware that the political culture around me was shifting in ways that made my old assumptions feel outdated. The idea of the “loyal opposition” felt harder to hold onto. The shared civic floor felt shakier. The space for good‑faith disagreement felt smaller. The emotional temperature of politics felt hotter, more personal, more totalizing.
I didn’t become more partisan. If anything, I became more discerning. I learned to hold two truths at once: I still see political opponents as human beings, and I also recognize that the stakes feel higher now than they did in the 90s. That dual awareness is exhausting, but it’s honest.
Sometimes I miss the political atmosphere of my youth — not because it was better, but because it was quieter. Slower. Less demanding. Less omnipresent. I miss the feeling that politics was something you could step into and out of, rather than something that followed you everywhere. I miss the idea that you could disagree with someone without needing to diagnose their moral character. I miss the assumption that accountability mattered more than loyalty.
But nostalgia isn’t analysis, and longing isn’t a political strategy. The truth is that my politics have changed without changing parties. My values have stayed consistent, but my relationship to the system has evolved.
I’ve learned that political identity is not a fixed point. It’s a moving relationship between you and the world you live in. It’s shaped by your experiences, your relationships, your disappointments, your hopes, and the emotional bandwidth you have at any given moment. It’s shaped by the times you inhale the news and the times you can’t bear to look at it. It’s shaped by the moments when you feel proud of your country and the moments when you feel uneasy about how it’s perceived. It’s shaped by the leaders you vote for and the leaders you critique. It’s shaped by the people you love, including the ones who live across a border.
If there’s a throughline to my political life, it’s this: I believe in accountability, even when it’s uncomfortable. I believe in disagreement without dehumanization. I believe in staying informed without sacrificing my mental health. I believe in stepping back when I need to, and stepping forward when it matters. I believe in holding complexity, even when the world demands simplicity. I believe in democracy as a shared project, not a spectator sport.
And I believe that political evolution doesn’t always look like switching parties or changing ideologies. Sometimes it looks like growing up. Sometimes it looks like seeing your country from another angle. Sometimes it looks like learning your limits. Sometimes it looks like refusing to surrender your nuance in a world that rewards certainty.
My politics have changed because I have changed — not in my core values, but in my understanding of what it means to live them out in a world that is louder, faster, and more polarized than the one I was born into. I’m still a Democrat. I’ve never voted Republican. But the meaning of those facts has shifted over time, shaped by experience, disappointment, hope, and the relentless churn of the news cycle.
I don’t know what the next decade will bring. I don’t know how my relationship to politics will continue to evolve. But I do know this: I want to stay engaged without losing myself. I want to stay informed without being consumed. I want to stay principled without becoming rigid. I want to stay open without being naïve. I want to stay human in a system that often forgets we are all human.
And maybe that’s the real story of my political life — not a shift from left to right, but a shift from certainty to complexity, from team identity to values, from constant vigilance to intentional engagement. A shift toward a politics that makes room for breath.
For decades, analysts have described this nation as a place of contradictions — a democracy with enormous potential but chronic instability, a country that celebrates its freedoms while struggling to protect them, a society that prides itself on resilience even as its institutions strain under the weight of their own history.
It is a country where citizens speak passionately about rights, but quietly admit they no longer trust the people in charge of safeguarding them. Where the constitution is revered as a national treasure, yet increasingly feels like a relic from a world that no longer exists. Where political leaders promise transformation but deliver stalemate, and where the public oscillates between hope and exhaustion.
A Government That Can’t Quite Govern
The legislature is a battleground of factions, alliances, and personal ambitions. Laws are proposed with great fanfare but rarely implemented with seriousness. Politicians campaign on reform, but once in office, they find themselves trapped in a system that rewards spectacle over substance.
The result is a government that appears active — always debating, always arguing, always announcing — yet struggles to produce outcomes that materially improve people’s lives.
A Judiciary Under Pressure
The courts are tasked with interpreting a constitution written in a different era, for a different society. Judges insist they are neutral arbiters, but their decisions often reflect the political storms swirling around them. Citizens argue over what the constitution means, but they agree on one thing: it is being asked to carry more weight than any document should.
Legal battles drag on for years. Precedents shift. Trust erodes.
A Security Crisis That Never Fully Ends
Violence is a constant undercurrent. In some regions, organized groups operate with alarming autonomy. In others, individuals radicalized by ideology or desperation commit acts that shake entire communities. The government responds with promises of reform, new strategies, new funding — yet the cycle continues.
People learn to live with a low‑grade fear. They avoid certain neighborhoods. They change their routines. They send their children to school with a quiet prayer.
Security is not absent. It is simply uneven.
An Economy of Winners and Losers
On paper, the nation is prosperous. Its industries are globally influential. Its cities are hubs of innovation and culture. But the prosperity is unevenly distributed. Wealth pools in certain regions and sectors, while others struggle with stagnation, underemployment, and rising costs.
The middle class feels squeezed. Young people feel priced out. Families work harder and fall further behind. Official statistics paint a picture of growth; lived experience tells a different story.
A Media Landscape That Thrives on Division
The media is loud, fragmented, and deeply polarized. Outlets cater to ideological tribes, reinforcing existing beliefs rather than challenging them. Sensationalism outperforms nuance. Conspiracy theories spread faster than corrections. Citizens live in parallel realities, each convinced the other is misinformed.
Information is abundant. Understanding is scarce.
A Culture of Fatigue
People are tired. Tired of corruption. Tired of violence. Tired of political theater. Tired of being told the system is working when their daily lives suggest otherwise. They love their country, but they fear its trajectory. They believe in democracy, but they question whether it can still deliver on its promises.
And yet, they cling to the national myth — the belief that their country is destined for greatness, that its flaws are temporary, that its challenges can be overcome with enough willpower and unity.
Hope persists, even when evidence falters.
You guys totally knew I was talking about Mexico, right? 😉
A series of concentrated personnel actions across the federal government has created an unusual pattern. The changes are not uniform. They are not happening across all agencies. And if they continue at their current scale, the operational effects will be significant.
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has faced repeated attempts at large‑scale dismissals, some of which have been paused by federal courts. The agency was designed to operate with continuity and a degree of insulation from political pressure.
If the firings proceed:
Case backlogs involving fraud, predatory lending, and credit‑card disputes would grow.
Supervisory examinations of financial institutions would slow, reducing oversight.
Enforcement actions could stall, allowing unresolved consumer‑protection violations to linger.
The agency’s ability to respond to emerging financial scams would be reduced.
The CFPB’s mandate is broad. A diminished workforce would affect millions of consumers, often in ways that are not immediately visible.
Central Intelligence Agency
The CIA is undergoing one of the largest personnel reductions in decades. Officers across multiple directorates have been told to resign or face termination. Some actions have been temporarily halted by the courts, but the broader effort continues.
If the firings proceed:
Operational continuity would be disrupted, particularly in long‑running intelligence programs.
Recruitment pipelines would narrow, affecting future staffing.
Analytical units could lose subject‑matter expertise built over years.
Foreign‑partner relationships might be strained if liaison officers rotate out without replacements.
Internal oversight and compliance functions could weaken.
Intelligence agencies rely on institutional memory. Rapid reductions create gaps that take years to repair.
Department of Defense
The Pentagon has seen significant personnel removals, particularly among senior military leaders and civilian defense employees. Reporting indicates a pattern consistent with the changes at the CFPB and CIA.
If the firings proceed:
Strategic planning offices would lose experienced staff.
Procurement and contracting processes could slow, affecting readiness.
Civilian oversight of military programs might weaken.
Training and doctrine development could be delayed.
Coordination with allied defense institutions might be affected by turnover.
Defense agencies are large, but they are not immune to the effects of rapid personnel loss.
Where Firings Are Not Occurring
Several agencies show no signs of similar activity:
State Department: Routine turnover only.
Department of Education: Stable staffing.
Department of Transportation: No large‑scale personnel actions.
Social Security Administration: Normal fluctuations.
National Institutes of Health: No evidence of workforce reductions beyond standard attrition.
The absence of firings in these agencies underscores that the current actions are targeted, not systemic.
If the Pattern Holds
If the concentrated firings at the CFPB, CIA, and Defense continue, the effects will not be immediate. They will accumulate. The common thread across these agencies is the reliance on specialized expertise — analysts, investigators, intelligence officers, compliance staff, and senior civilian leaders.
Losing them quickly creates operational gaps that are difficult to fill. Replacing them takes time. Rebuilding institutional knowledge takes longer.
A Developing Picture
For domestic readers, the implications are direct: agencies responsible for consumer protection, intelligence, and national security are undergoing rapid change. For international readers, the developments offer a view into how American institutions respond under pressure and how courts act as a counterweight.
The personnel actions are ongoing. The legal challenges continue. And the operational consequences — if the firings proceed — will unfold over months and years, not days.
I’ll continue tracking the changes as they develop.
There are cases that seize the public imagination not because of their brutality, but because of the unsettling questions they leave in their wake. The Reiner case is one of them. A young man from a prominent family, a double homicide, and a courtroom appearance that lasted only minutes — yet the ripples continue to spread.
In the early days after the killings, the narrative was simple, almost too simple: a privileged son, a horrific act, and a community demanding answers. But as more details emerged, the story shifted. Not toward exoneration, but toward comprehension. Toward the uncomfortable recognition that sometimes the most dangerous place a person can be is inside their own mind.
Reiner had been diagnosed with schizophrenia years before the tragedy. He had been medicated, monitored, and treated. And then, in the weeks leading up to the killings, something changed. His medication was adjusted — the specifics sealed by court order, the timing left deliberately vague. But anyone familiar with the fragile architecture of psychiatric treatment knows that the danger lies not in the dosage, but in the transition. The liminal space between one medication and the next, when the old drug has left the bloodstream and the new one has not yet taken hold. It is in that gap that reality can warp.
People imagine psychosis as a loss of morality. It is not. It is a loss of interpretation. A person can know right from wrong and still be unable to trust what they see, hear, or feel. They can believe they are in danger when they are not. They can perceive enemies where none exist. They can act out of terror rather than malice.
And that is the tragedy of the Reiner case. Not that he forgot the rules of society, but that he was living in a world that bore no resemblance to the one the rest of us inhabit.
The legal system, however, is not built to parse such distinctions. It asks a narrow question: did the defendant understand that killing is wrong. It does not ask whether he believed — in the distorted logic of untreated psychosis — that he was acting in self‑defense, or defense of others, or under the pressure of delusional necessity. The law concerns itself with morality; psychiatry concerns itself with perception. Between those two poles, people like Reiner fall.
There is no version of this story in which he walks free again. The danger he poses is too great, the break from reality too profound. But there is also no version in which a prison cell is the right answer. Prisons are built for punishment, not treatment. They are ill‑equipped to manage the complexities of severe mental illness. A forensic psychiatric institution, secure and long‑term, is the only place where he can be both contained and cared for.
It is better for society. It is better for him. And it is, in its own stark way, the only humane outcome left.
Cases like this linger because they force us to confront the limits of our systems — legal, medical, moral. They remind us that danger does not always wear the face of evil. Sometimes it wears the face of a young man whose mind betrayed him, and whose fate now rests in the uneasy space between justice and mercy.
Hollywood has always been a stage for tragedy. The lights, the premieres, the carefully curated lives—all of it a performance. But sometimes the curtain falls in ways too brutal for fiction. On December 14, 2025, Rob Reiner, the director who gave us When Harry Met Sally and A Few Good Men, and his wife Michele Singer Reiner, were found stabbed to death in their Brentwood home. Their son, Nick, stands accused. The crime is not in dispute. The scandal is how we respond.
The Reiner murders are the kind of case that grips the public imagination: a famous family, a son unraveling, a crime scene in one of Los Angeles’s most storied neighborhoods. It is the stuff of tabloids and true‑crime podcasts, but it is also a test of our civic values. What do we do when the accused is both a killer and a man in psychological crisis? Do we indulge in vengeance, or do we insist on justice without cruelty?
Capital punishment is the great American charade. Politicians thunder about closure, prosecutors posture about justice, and jurors are told it is the ultimate reckoning. Yet in states with moratoriums, the death sentence is a hollow gesture—a cruel theater that drags on for decades. The condemned wait. The families wait. Nothing is resolved. It is a performance of justice, not justice itself.
Life in prison is not mercy. It is punishment, and it is permanent. It is waking up every day in a cell, with no escape but the books you read or the thoughts you manage to salvage. It is accountability without the hypocrisy of a death sentence that will never be carried out. It is honest. It says: you will live with what you’ve done. You will not be erased, but you will not be free.
Nick Reiner’s crime is heinous. It will never be excused. But he is still a human being. To kill him would be to indulge in the very cruelty we claim to abhor. To confine him for life is to insist that justice can be carried out without abandoning humanity. He may never walk outside prison walls again, but he can still read, still learn, still reflect. Doing this horrible thing only defines him if he lets it.
The Reiner case is not just about one family’s tragedy. It is about the values we inscribe into our justice system. Do we believe in punishment as spectacle, or punishment as accountability? Do we believe in vengeance masquerading as virtue, or in justice that refuses cruelty? These are not abstract questions. They are the choices we make in courtrooms, in legislatures, and in the public square.
Hollywood will move on. The premieres will continue, the scandals will pile up, and the tabloids will find new fodder. But the Reiner case will remain a ledger entry in our civic archive. It will remind us that even in the face of horror, we must resist the temptation to kill in the name of justice. We must insist that accountability and compassion are not opposites, but simultaneities.
We do not kill to prove killing is wrong. We do not let vengeance masquerade as virtue. Justice must be real. Cruelty must be refused.
Antisemitism is no longer a local prejudice whispered in alleyways or scrawled on synagogue walls. It has become a transnational rupture, spreading across continents with the velocity of online hate and the fuel of geopolitical flashpoints.
The Bondi Beach massacre in Australia — fifteen lives extinguished during a Hanukkah celebration — is not an isolated tragedy. It is part of a grim ledger: Europe reports record spikes in France, Germany, and the UK, where pro‑Hamas demonstrations have blurred into antisemitic violence. North America logs hundreds of incidents in 2025 alone, from vandalism to physical assaults, with August marking the highest monthly total ever recorded in the U.S. Latin America, particularly Argentina, has seen antisemitic demonstrations swell, echoing the same rhetoric that ricochets across social media feeds worldwide.
This is not coincidence. It is globalization of hate. The same platforms that connect families across oceans now connect extremists across borders. The same geopolitical flashpoints that ignite protests also ignite prejudice.
For centuries, antisemitism has not been a passing prejudice but a recurring wound in the Jewish story. From the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem to the expulsions from Spain and England, from pogroms in Eastern Europe to the Holocaust itself, Jewish communities have lived under the shadow of suspicion, scapegoating, and violence. Each era dressed the hatred in new clothes — religious dogma, nationalist fervor, racial pseudoscience — but the underlying impulse remained the same: to mark Jews as outsiders, to deny them belonging, and to punish them for imagined sins.
This history is not abstract. It is inscribed in memory, in ritual, in the very rhythm of Jewish life. The Passover story of liberation, the mourning of Tisha B’Av, the candlelit resilience of Hanukkah — all of these are cultural responses to oppression, reminders that survival itself is a form of resistance. To be Jewish has often meant carrying both the weight of persecution and the stubborn joy of continuity.
What makes the current global rise in antisemitism so heavy is that it echoes these ancient ruptures. The rhetoric may be digital now, the attacks amplified by algorithms instead of pulpits, but the pattern is familiar. Once again, Jewish communities are forced to defend their right to exist, to worship, to gather without fear. Once again, the world is confronted with the question of whether it will allow prejudice to metastasize unchecked.
The scandal is not only in the acts themselves but in the normalization of rhetoric that makes them possible. Antisemitism has shifted from fringe prejudice into mainstream discourse, amplified by algorithms and weaponized by political opportunism.
To write about this is to resist erasure. To inscribe it into the archive is to say: this is not just another headline. It is a global scandal, a cultural wound, and a reminder that prejudice, left unchecked, metastasizes across borders.
I’m out of escitalopram, so I’m waiting on an appointment with my psychiatrist and trying not to beat myself up with depression. When I don’t take my medication, I am likely to lapse into thinking about how much I suck. This is normal, I just need to take a pill, and then I will go back to a normal amount of beating myself up.
I’m trying to stop that, too, but it’s harder when your brain knows the very best lies to use against you. I’m combatting it by taking Tylenol, because I’m already autistic and there’s lots of research that says physical and emotional pain stem from the same source. It’s not just a placebo effect.
I also had some ice cream, and that always makes things look better. I went to Wawa for a parfait. It’s my new thing. Vanilla soft serve with chocolate syrup and peppermint crunchies because it’s just that time of year.
It was actually my second Wawa run of the day, because they do $3.00 lattes in the morning and that’s irresistible. I wake up very early and drive out to a Wawa about 30 minutes away so that I can spend some time in the car with my mind engaged. I don’t like being in my apartment because it’s so dark. Any excuse to leave and I’m out of here. I didn’t need soft serve, I made it up.
But it’s funny how bad I needed it compared to looking at these four walls.
Especially when my Xfinity internet connection went down, because then there was nothing to do. No TV, no surfing, no nothing except writing, and who wants to do that?
Kidding, I could have created a local document and pasted it into WordPress, but it was easier just to take a break and come back to the house once my connection was restored.
I needed to leave the house because my cell phone signal is so poor I cannot tether other devices to it. I mean, my cell signal is perfect when I’m not inside the house, but for some reason I continually miss calls and SMS when I’m down here.
“Down here” is probably the entire reason my signal sucks. I hope that moving to a new apartment helps. I’ll have to go to the office and see what’s up with that. They said a few weeks, but now that I have trips scheduled I need to move on a certain timeline.
I was grateful when I told Bryn that Sam said she didn’t want to be in my life that she said, “well, you kind of dodged a bullet there, anyway.” It’s true, I did. She didn’t trust me because of bad past experiences and wasn’t adult enough to talk about them calmly.
As I’ve said before, I’m poly, but would have been willing to settle down with only Sam if she’d asked. Here’s how it really went down.
We were absolutely crazy about each other. I told her that I had a first date coming up, and she told me not to cancel it. That she didn’t have time to devote to a full time girlfriend, didn’t have time to care, etc.
For three weeks she told me this lie while in her heart of hearts she only wanted me. It was a first date, not serious at all. If Sam had told me how she really felt, I would have listened- and in fact was disappointed that she didn’t jump at the chance to be exclusive. It was a miscommunication, because I gave her exactly what she asked for.
She called me hysterical while I was at Zac’s house and broke up with me. There was no discussion and the break was final. She told me that she couldn’t trust me, because in the back of her head she would always wonder if I was cheating.
Darlin,’ that’s not how poly works. I have to be brave enough to tell you what’s going to happen and you have to be brave enough to choose whether you want to continue our relationship. I give you that same power. There is no reason to cheat because dating other people is part of the contract.
And not only that, even at three weeks I could envision us having a very cool life together because there were so many huge things solved, like having similar music and church backgrounds.
I wanted only her, but she told me she didn’t have time.
Bryn is right. I dodged a bullet because what she really wanted was to be exclusive from the first date…. But she didn’t want to come get me all the time and it was so hard because I lived so far and all these other bullshit excuses because I had Uber and public transit. I never asked her to take me anywhere. She offered and resented it.
I was in a different financial position then, and couldn’t afford a car with the latest technology to allow me to drive safely, and I was infantilized for it.
So, I do see Bryn’s point. It’s not bad that someone who treated me like a child passed on the chance to do it again.
All of these things are swirling around in my head as I try to let go of a small rejection that is only large because I’m out of escitalopram. Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria is the worst when my serotonin feels wonky, and I just have to remember that it’s no big deal that Sam and I won’t see each other ever again, because in the grand scheme of things, it matters about as much as Dunkin being out of the donuts I like.
I really only like Boston Cream.
I’m trying to keep my spirits up by refueling with caffeine regularly. I’ve had enough now that I’m starting to feel some relief.
Most of my upset this afternoon was outrage at the president, but I don’t get any forward motion out of hating him. There’s very little I can do about that particular situation because his own party is tolerant of conduct unbecoming.
Trump is giving off King George vibes, and he can no longer hold down the madness. Saying that Democrats could do anything that was seditious enough to be punishable by death is barbaric. Calling a reporter “piggy” falls under the same category. He gets worse and worse, people in power defending him when they know they’ve never seen anything like him.
It’s going to get worse before it gets better, and Trump’s policy won’t get better if he steps down. JD Vance won’t change anything back. However, I do think that it would stop attacks on the press.
I’m going to level with you, especially the Americans.
This is not normal. The president is Looney Tunes and his party doesn’t care. We are trapped in this situation because they won’t invoke 25 and they won’t impeach him. He can say all the crazy shit he wants absolutely unchecked.
It is so bad that I have to keep my head down. I don’t listen to the news often, and I try not to retain what I’ve heard. If I need something, I’ll ask AI. Only focusing on myself and my community keeps me sane, because I go in cycles. When I can handle more, I’ll absorb it. But you have to tap out. There’s news fatigue because the country is so unstable.
But when I focus just on my local community, my world seems right again. There has to be a balance, because it can’t be all or nothing. I have a drive to be informed, but I hate audio stories about the president because his voice grates on my last damn nerve.
I don’t want people to write me off as “just a Democrat,” either. I have never voted Republican, but I went to the Republican convention in 1992 just to be there because it was in Houston and I have actually met President George H.W. Bush. My sister met Ronald Reagan. I have never held people’s beliefs against them until my rights were up for grabs. A difference of opinion is whether coffee is delicious, not whether I’m an American.
I’ve been out as queer since I was 13 or 14 years old, depending on who you ask. When I was a child, I thought the best I would get out of life is no one caring I lived with a roommate because I knew I didn’t want to marry a man.
Now, I don’t want to marry anyone. If you value your own sanity, you won’t ask.
Things with marriage equality have changed so much in my lifetime, but I’m just past that point in my life where I want and need government entanglement. My track record with marriage isn’t the greatest and I know that I will never change. My attention deficit doesn’t mix with long relationships thus far.
I’m not fatalistic, I’m just over it.
I’m over all the drama that a relationship escalator creates and I want to tap out. I know that things change, and late in life I could be surprised and want to get married again. It’s not that I don’t believe in it. It’s that the best indication of future behavior is the past.
If you always do what you always did, you always get what you always got.
I don’t want to be the same person I’ve always been, because I am ready for a new chapter in my life. I got comfortable with just relaxing in my sweats and writing to Aada while the world passed me by. I didn’t notice, and don’t regret it. But things are getting more exciting around here and I want to be present for it.
The ego boost that my search results in Copilot gave me have me focused on creative projects and that’s all on me. I don’t require input for those, I just need to sit down at my desk and actually work on them.
I don’t need to think about cute girls, but Imma do it anyway.
Although thinking about cute girls is a misnomer, because my taste skews much older than me.
If you were born female and your taste skews older, there is this moment.
You want a cougar til you realize you ARE the cougar.
Oh, my God you guys. I’m still stuck on how much Aada thinks I hate her because of the way I portrayed her. I can’t do anything about it, it just sits in my stomach like a rock.
I hope that in time she’ll believe in fairy tales again,
I will believe that there is capability for redemption between us until time runs…………………………………………..
I love who I am, and don’t need to change me. But there are situations where it would be helpful. I wish I could turn into Supergrover or Bryn at a moment’s notice because they get the cute girl discount on everything (not just me- this is a worldwide response to meeting them in person). I wish I had more of a presence- my voice is enormous, and people tend to think it’s hilarious I’m short in real life. Someone actually said, “I thought you’d be taller” when they met me and my ex-wife thought that was hilarious for years. My voice doesn’t match the rest of me because I have no problem talking directly to the president one on one.
Mr. President, I think you’re a sack of shit in a cheap suit, which makes no sense because you’re a billionaire….. right? Surely it’s not all on paper? Even if you spend plenty of money, your tailor doesn’t like you.
I might like to be President Trump for one day if I got to retain the information afterwards. In a situation like this, I’d have to be careful not to change anything. I don’t know how to act like Trump enough to be able to go unnoticed. But the important point would be to understand how much he understands. I don’t think it’s much. Learning things would be access to the room where it’s happening. It is my opinion that as long as I ignored everything that was going on and didn’t say much, I could take them down.
The outlets as to where to do this are getting tampered with as well. Jeff Bezos has already said Opinion is going to tilt to the right at WaPo. I bought Mother Jones, Wired, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker. I subscribed to Josh Johnson’s YouTube Channel (comedian and correspondent at The Daily Show). I am seeking out writers in the know, and in publications that aren’t generally targeted. People don’t tend to mess with Graydon Carter’s empire. It’s going to be harder to get a job as a reporter anywhere, which is why I’m glad that I work for the web. The people pay my salary, and if I’m not saying what resonates with them, they won’t come back. However, I am unlikely to be shut down by the government for saying inflammatory things. I believe in a free market. First Amendment rights are under fire because Trump has the same fragile ego as Putin. They only agree that Zelensky started a war because “Servant of the People” ridiculed someone with no ability to take criticism at all. A satirical TV show needs to be destroyed in their minds, not simply ignored.
I cannot predict what I would do once I had this information, but I can predict that things would happen quickly because pattern recognition doesn’t lie. And in fact, pattern recognition is so good for autists that we already know that the United States is fucked and it will never, ever go back to the way it was. That’s not “give up.” That means, “you have no choice now. The old system has passed away and you are forced to build something new.” Fascism is here to stay for three more years officially, and fifty to a hundred more through the Supreme Court. Good luck getting rid of DOGE.
The president is unhinged. He is serious that:
The West Bank should be a resort. All of it. Let’s displace two million people.
We should own Greenland (why?)
Canada should be “The 51st State” (why?)
The president has already agreed with Netanyahu on the West Bank. Therefore, Canada and Greenland are feeling threatened….. but “Republicans didn’t vote for this.”
There are referendums and recalls and all sorts of things, but we’re not using them. Somehow, even if you are so dumb you don’t have two brain cells to rub together, you aren’t subject to a new election….. but you could be.
I don’t think anyone’s going to recall the president. But people can recall the ones they voted for that are just carrier pigeons. Marjorie Taylor Greene is not capable. Why is America still pretending she is?
Why is stupid a positive?
Why do I have to waste an incredible wish on something like wanting to be Donald Trump just so I could foil every plan he ever made?
Why can’t I just let it go and want to be a Disney Princess?
Today’s lesson in Finnish (Suomi in that language, Day 26) started with learning how to negate something. I’ve been able to say what I am for a long time. It is a relief to be able to say both that I am not an adjective… and I do not have a noun.
The worst sentence (lause) in every language is “Meillä ei ole kahvia.” Finns, calm yourselves. I am actually okay. I have enough. I have to say that out loud because this sentence would send shivers down any Finn’s spine…. “We do not have any coffee.” However, I am not opposed to getting Finnish coffee in the mail. I have resources.
It’s good to have a friend on the ground who said she’d let me mail things to her house when I buy my tickets to Finland. That’s because it’s actually difficult to buy Finnish products over the internet. I am having a hell of a time finding Moomin books in Suomi, so please advise in the comments. I do not want a new boxed set. I want one that has been colored in, dog-eared, and annotated in Suomi because a child loved it so much. Moomin is the new picture I carry in my wallet… er… phone.
This is not an official, licensed picture. I asked the WordPress AI to do a line drawing of Moomin for me, if that is a thing you needed to know you could do, @one4paws. I needed to make that clear because it doesn’t exactly look like Moomin to me, either. However, I do think that if she were alive Tove Jannson would think it was inferior yet clever. I would have gotten one of my artists to draw it for me, but they are currently sleeping. I am often left to my own devices because my body clock is set differently than most people. I move with the sun, going to bed and getting up early.
My favorite fact in life is that when I told Katya that I thought Tove Jansson was a smoke show, she made sure to tell me she was a lesbian. I said, “sounds like a woman I would have liked to have flirted with.” She said, “Well….may be…. she was loved by all….” 😁
Janie the Canadian Editor says that I make her spit out her tea; this line made kahvi stream out of my nose.
The Finns are an interesting case study to me sociologically because so much is counterintuitive to some American cultures, not all. For instance, Finland is like Texas in that people are brave and daring and do lots of outdoor shit comparable to “hey Bubba…. watch this!” They just aren’t conservative socially. Finnish culture is Oregonian. It is no surprise to me that Linus Torvalds moved from Helsinki to Hillsboro or wherever it is he’s living now. My love of Linus/Linux is legendary, and it doesn’t surprise me that I would want to make the reverse move, either. I just may not end up in somewhere as warm as Helsinki because culinary school in Vaasa is free.
The average temperature in the winter is 22 degrees Fahrenheit, which is not colder than Baltimore- it’s just colder more consistently. The average temperature in Helsinki during the winter warms up dramatically…. it is 24 degrees.
Therefore, I will not have a problem when it’s sunny out. Being layered and in the sun is great. It’s the rain, snow, and wind that becomes a problem. However, you have these problems everywhere. In Oklahoma, “it’s not that the wind is blowin….’ it’s what the wind is blowin'” (Ron White). Those are the days you say inside and celebrate your sauna.
Again, I work on the internet. I don’t have to go outside unless I just want to do so…. and I do. I love cold weather, feeling bundled up and secure in all my gear. I am not a prude of any sort. I just have sensory issues with a tremendous amount of heat and there it is. That’s why they do it…. and why they don’t care that they’re naked. It’s just about being comfortable in said heat.
I have said this before, but in case it’s behind a paywall on Medium, Finland has the highest rate of neurodivergence in the world that has been diagnosed. I believe that there are quite a few more undiagnosed people due to the amount of coffee they drink. Caffeine is my go-to choice in managing neurodivergence. Apparently, they already thought of that.
Portland is the same way in terms of volume. I never really had a cup of coffee until I went there on vacation. That’s because Texans don’t drink their coffee as bitter and dark as Oregonians, coupled with the fat of half and half, no sugar. I like Texas coffee just fine, my palate leans toward bold. Therefore, I want something French roast and cream thick enough to stand up to it. It’s hard to please me in vegan, but soy milk does nicely. It’s the thickest and all coffee shops have hazelnut syrup to make the nuttiness of the plant milk make sense in your brain.
I would argue that one of the best drinks in coffee shops is a soy hazelnut latte, because soy milk is not better than cream. Soy beans and hazelnuts bond together in your mind and it just tastes better. Use cream for something else. Everything has the right application.
These are the things that keep me going, because I have found that coffee is cheaper and more efficient than energy drinks. Energy drinks aren’t bad if you buy them by the case, but coffee is still cheaper overall. Plus, I like it when my coffee every morning tastes the same and it’s plain. I haven’t found an energy drink that just tastes like Coke, Pepsi, or Sprite. Therefore, I drink energy drinks as often as most adults who liked Fanta as a kid would drink it…. occasionally to remember, not an every day beverage. The same goes for grape, cherry, and fruit punch. They make me feel like a kid so sometimes I’ll indulge, but my energy and money goes toward fine coffee at the grocery store and cutting out leaving the house.
As I told Katya, “I like working in my own office because no one makes my coffee for me. Therefore, it’s always right and I do not have to share.” I do not mind sharing my coffee, to be clear. I mind other people beating me to the coffeemaker and I have to suffer through it until it runs out and I can make the next one.
Just level a tablespoon when you’re measuring. One level tablespoon per cup. Being exacting is what makes it taste good. And if you do not have a tablespoon that is capable of being leveled, then err on the side of too much rather than too little. You can add hot water later. You cannot fix it when there is not enough coffee flavor and too much hot water.
12 tablespoons is a cup, so I do the shortcut of keeping my coffee in a large enough container to accommodate a one cup scoop. I do not make a cup at a time because coffee (especially mine) is so acidic that I don’t mind drinking left over in the morning.
I do not reheat coffee, though. I prefer it over ice once it’s already cool. If it’s cold outside and I just must reheat, it’s over the stove. Some people cannot tell a difference, but when I microwave my coffee, it seems to change the properties of the drink itself. I can’t name it. It’s just weird.
I also alternate between putting a cup of coffee into a coffee maker and putting a cup of coffee into a Mason jar with a chinois (fine-mesh sieve). The percolating process and cold brew yield different results, and I like the change. It doesn’t matter what temperature it is outside, I like iced coffee when I’m inside. We have heat here.
The point is that I have taken an enormous amount of crap over the years for drinking energy drinks because it makes me look younger than I really am. Meanwhile, caffeine is one of the most effective ADHD medications on earth. I do not need to feel ashamed of “being addicted.” I need to manage how much I drink in accordance with the laundry list of what’s wrong with me and why. For instance, one of the huge reasons that I order cases of energy drinks from Amazon (when I do) is that coffee irritates my stomach and I still need the caffeine. Soda is not as acidic, and it is also sugar free (in my case- all the flavors I really like are either zero or 10 calories). Therefore, it’s another case of application. When my stomach feels better, I go back to cold brew.
Cold brew actually saves my stomach as well, which is why I haven’t used my coffeemaker in a few weeks. It is naturally less acidic when the water is cold, and I brew in the fridge or (when there’s not a danger of it freezing) outside. Sun coffee is just as beautiful.
“Sun coffee” is apt, as I am energized by the sun and need to be outside. My neighborhood isn’t the greatest place to walk around (it’s not dangerous, it’s just not touristy with parks and community, either. My readers might not agree that it’s safe, but one break-in in the DMV over the last 11 years is probably some kind of record- and he was so high that if the patio door had been locked, he would have moved on. He did not look like the type of guy that would break glass. He wasn’t even moving that fast. I just decided not to chase him over cheap ass shit.).
I need to find a place in the city that fits the bill. Right now it’s Panera because I have a gift card, but where is up to me. I’m glad I have a gift card to something familiar while I am looking for something permanent. I support local coffee shops, I just haven’t been here long enough to explore Baltimore. Wherever my mythical perfect coffee shop is, it does not exist in my neighborhood. I’m going to have to search farther.
For Portlanders, I’m looking for Rimsky’s Korsakoffee. For Houstonians, I’m looking for Notsuoh. For The District, I’m looking for Tryst. I am sure that there are many great coffee shops in Baltimore, I just haven’t found them yet.
Luckily, I have help here. My friend Ernest is a young college kid willing to help me get settled because I’m willing to help him get settled. I told him he could hang out at my place if his room was too loud. I have plenty of space and wouldn’t mind someone working with me during the day. His being African helps me out because the way he cooks, I haven’t learned yet. The way I cook, he hasn’t learned yet.
So, I definitely need to meet up with him soon. It’s a great story. We met on an Uber Share. I was looking at apartments and was planning to move to Baltimore. It was his second week in America from Liberia.
Silver Spring to Baltimore isn’t much of a change in demographics, only that there are more African Americans here, as opposed to African immigrants who have come over recently to study and work. Silver Spring has an enormous African immigrant population, one of the reasons I’m interested in learning languages.
However, I did tell my housemate Valentin (Cameroonian) that “francais c’nest pas comfortable pour moi.” His mother, who didn’t know a lick of English, fell on the floor laughing. Because of course when I’m on the spot, I say the first thing that comes to my mind…. “French is not comfortable for me,” a line from an old Michel Tomas recording rather than thinking out how to say “I don’t speak French.”
Puhun suomaista.
However, I am not advanced enough to know why the name changes from Suomi/suomea to suomalista. I just have to roll with it at this point, thus the flaw of being at the top of the ruby league by rote. I need more grammar study because parroting back (see what I did there?) words isn’t helping me to understand systems.
I see everything through systems, and Finnish is called a pyramid…. but it’s a garden. You pick up yksi sana, ja yhdestä sanasta tulee kaksi sanaa. You pick up one word, and one word becomes two words.
Minulla on norjalainen ystävä kuka kirjoittaa. Norjalainen kissat on viikinki. J.L. Henry on viikinki. Tämä vaustaus on oikein koska kirjoittajat ovat kuin kissat.
This is what the Ruby League has gotten me. The paragraph reads “I have a Norwegian friend who writes. Norwegian cats are Vikings. J.L. Henry is a Viking. This answer is correct because writers are like cats.”
One of the sentences that comes up in Duolingo the most frequently is “Norjalainen kissa on viikinki.” It means “the Norwegian cat is a Viking.” I have extrapolated this to mean all Norwegian cats are Vikings because I have owned one and I know that that means….
Life is about breathing steadily right now, turning panic into progress. Slowing down and making plans to breathe next week.
I’m overwhelmed with the amount of support you’ve given me over the years, so I’m paying it forward.
Duolingo is a vocabulary builder that will allow me to become C3PO. The spiritual arc is gravity’s rainbow. The bomb inside you goes off in every language.
Your life’s purpose is to figure out what kind of shrapnel there will be in advance, because you’re the one directing it.
A number of years ago, I read a book called “Walking the Bible” by Bruce Feiler. It details the story of a man who fell in love with the Old Testament by seeing it through the eyes of the people who lived there. The setting is often a character in any book, and in the Bible, it is a big one. The land has been up for grabs the same way it is in current day Israel and Palestine. It’s not the same fight, but it has psychological roots that are thousands of years old. The reason it is due to psychological roots is that the region has been complicated since Moses walked the earth (or when we think he did, anyway)…. yet not always for the same reason.
I am tired of American Jews and Christians who call antisemitism on people who hate Israel. It is appropriate to hate Israel, the nation-state, not Judaism. Benjamin Netanyahu is the one that’s genocidal. He bombs integrated neighborhoods without a second thought. If he doesn’t care about Jews, why would you think that people who call him out are antisemitic? I promise, Bejamin Netanyahu does not give a shit about Jews. If he did, he would care how many of his own people he killed while trying to avoid a two-state solution. Netanyahu and American Evangelicals are great at calling people antisemitic, when in reality we are saying both peoples have value. The Israelis and the Palestinians deserve a two-state solution, because it feels like no one is reading their Bibles these days. Both Jews and the evangelical Christians in the American congress funneling money to them seem to forget that God promised to prosper both Sarah and Hagar’s families. Ishmael is not less important than Isaac, but good luck getting Israel to see it.
I am particularly incensed at American Christians, because the Quran is just as much a teaching tool as the Old Testament if you’re willing to be taught. Isa ibn Maryam is the same person as Jesus of Nazareth, because it literally means “Jesus, son of Mary.” Jesus is one of the most miraculous people in the “trilogy,” because since in Islam the virgin birth translates to “no father,” he is the only person in the Quran whose lineage follows the matriarchal line. And in fact, the ONLY person whose begat starts with a woman in any of the Abramic texts.
Hm.
It would be my dream to walk around Jerusalem, seeing all the sights from the West Bank to Golan Heights. I would like to write a prayer for all my loved ones at the Wailing Wall. I would like to ride a “ship of the desert” (camel). Having lots of military friends helps in planning these trips, because they’ve all been to the Middle East and are supportive of me going “but not in the summer….. save your sanity and go in October.”
My advice for Houston as well. 😛
It’s not just Israel and Palestine, though. I would love a road trip all over MENA (State abbreviation- Middle East North Africa), especially Cairo. I am still taken by what Egypt looks like from the back of a motorcycle, a sequence of film that runs in my head thanks to John Brennan. He wrote an autobiography called “Undaunted” (I need a new copy. I did not know he reads the audiobook and my Kindle doesn’t read it in his voice. 😛 ) The book starts when Brennan is a young adult- in my eyes, a child- riding around Cairo high as hell on hashish and just taking life for everything it’s worth. He also had an earring. So, even though Brennan is a current badass, my action figure of him is about 19. 😛
It is so interesting to me that I grew up as a preacher’s kid and now I love international relations and espionage. Those things are seemingly unrelated, but if you look up the personality “requirements” for “spy” and “preacher’s kid,” the Venn diagram is a circle. I promise. If you work for CIA and a preacher’s kid comes to interview with you, hire them and worry about the consequences later. You can teach a preacher’s kid tradecraft.
You cannot teach a spy a personality that will instantly put everyone in the room at ease, and more importantly, teach one that makes someone else want to talk to you. Spies have to come with that preinstalled, and it’s hard to find. It’s one of the reasons CIA is so picky about operatives and yet ALWAYS looking for them. It’s easy to find operatives who are skilled at photography, etc. But what about operatives that can stay calm and just talk to terrorists like you’ve been sitting on the back porch with them for 20 years? I do not get information by talking. I get information by being an empathetic listener. I find that if I just hold space, other people don’t like silence, even when it’s comfortable. They will begin to talk to avoid it. So, you join their reality. Talk about whatever they’re talking about. The information you need will often come without them realizing they just gave it, because hey…. we’re just talking about hummus and how it’s so much better in Iran than it is in Turkey, etc.
It’s akin to play therapy with children, and it seems like I’m being dismissive when I am really, really not. The best information comes when you’re doing something else.
I also want to walk Jonna Mendez’s books, because I cannot know, but I can take a very educated guess that she’s been to the Middle East a time or two…. Her books focus on The Cold War, but any operations she would have done after that are still classified. She’s a very unique spy to study; he saw two large scale operations at CIA take place. One of them was external, and one of them was internal. Externally, there was a shift to bring CIA back into the paramilitary fold once counterterrorism in the Middle East began, and at the time, they embraced it.
Therefore, it pisses me off that spies are viewed with suspicion and the military gets glory, because whether your loved one is a spy or a soldier, they need the same amount of love on return to the US. CIA doesn’t get it because they don’t ask for it, preferring to be shrouded in mystery. But it’s not like we couldn’t have an intelligence services day like we have a Veterans Day. There are like, 17 major intelligence agencies in the government, and up to (I think) 33 depending on who’s counting. It would not be an invasion of privacy to acknowledge every intelligence officer/agent we have in the nation.
I do feel some kind of way about including FBI, though. I am stuck in an “ACAB” loop, and the FBI is part of it. I won’t get into it, but national police aren’t much kinder than local. However, I will say for the record “Not All Feebs,” because of course not every FBI agent in the nation is a bad apple. And yet, they are. Because you don’t have nine good apples and one bad one if everyone is complicit. Everyone says “one bad apple” as a way of saying not all people are racist, bigoted, etc……. not realizing that the entire phrase is that “one bad apple spoils the bunch.”
This leads me to the second change that Jonna witnessed at CIA, which is the complete 180 on women in leadership roles. The reason I went straight from “bad apples” at FBI to women at CIA is because misogyny is part of the reason I view them with suspicion, part of the ACAB oeuvre, as it were. I wish they’d realize they’re working with broken crayons over there, because I’ve read “The Unexpected Spy” by Tracy Walder. She worked for CIA, then FBI. It was stunning the way her work life moved back in time, because “welcome to Hooverville.” Don’t think that just because J. Edgar was a cross-dresser that it made him any less racist or misogynistic.
CIA gets the gold star in this arena because they openly recruit women, people of color, and the entire queer spectrum. The best part is that once they’re onboarded, the culture really is that open. If FBI has the same way of recruiting, everything I’ve read says that once you’re onboarded, you’ll be stuck in a job where you were promised equality that never materializes. It is interesting to note that FBI works in the United States. CIA works outside of the United States. I think these two things are related, tbh.
Who would have the bigger world view in terms of what’s important? Who has seen the most in terms of how other countries do things? Who would have a less US-centric version of the world?
So, going to the Middle East allows me to study all of the things I love at once, because so much has happened there from the time the Bible was written until now. It brings alive my theology and my love of intelligence, and people wonder why my love of both is so strong. I believe in using knowledge to fight our enemies, because it saves lives. If we go in with a team of spies and steal whatever documents we need (or plans, or weapons, or whatever- it doesn’t matter), that saves a deployment of troops nearly every time.
I also think other militaries and intelligence agencies deserve respect, particularly Mossad because they are very good at what they do. However, my problem is that because Palestine is not a recognized state, only Mossad has verified intelligence in the region. With a two-state solution, both Palestinian and Israeli intelligence would be received through proper channels. It’s not about tearing Israel down but building Palestine up.
I hope that I can shed a little light on this- why the Biden administration’s relationship with Israel is such a goat-roping clusterfuck and why we can’t just say “fuck Netanyahu” and go in guns blazing to save the Palestinians (as much as I want to. Right this minute.). It would be a disaster if Mossad decided to stop sharing information with us, because they’re the best intelligence agency in the region.
It is also why “walking the Bible” is in my future travel plans, and not my current.
I am a political science major, and yet also off the grid in terms of listening to the news all day. I’ve been training my AI, walking the dog, and blissfully ignorant of the state of the world. Therefore, I did not hear until late last night that someone shot at Donald Trump at a rally, and there was one person killed and two people injured. I have a lot of mixed feelings about this, and none of them are about the shooting itself, but the aftermath.
The picture taken of Trump at the rally makes him look like he survived something…. which, to be fair, he did. I have a feeling his opinion on gun laws might change if he’s innocent and had nothing to do with that incredible photo. But that picture is worth a million words, and our party is fighting over whether Joe Biden is cognitively impaired. This is an enormous amount of damage in terms of optics. It fucking looks like Iwo Jima. It makes him look like everything he’s not.
However, Trump is Trump. If he thought he was slipping in the polls, I would not think it was weird for a convicted felon to arrange for someone to come and rough him up at a rally. Trump is all about optics. He once tied up the entire neighborhood in front of the White Houe for a photo shoot with a Bible. he is not known for thinking things through. I am not a conspiracy theorist or ignorant of the fact that there are crazies everywhere. I just know that Donald Trump is willing to cross lines that other politicians aren’t, and it might not be the right answer, but it’s a question worth asking.
Trump does not have the emotional range to care about the people that got hurt at the rally and the man shot by Secret Service.
But let’s turn it on its head. Which party is known for having lax gun laws? Which candidate is known for lies and coverups that are mind-boggling in their convoluted nature and yet still uneducated and wrong?
It’s probably just wishful thinking that he arranged all of this for the cameras, but it’s not wrong that I thought it. It is not a thing that is unlike something Donald Trump would do. Few people would disagree that arranging this photo would be out of character for him. I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt while also being realistic and saying that Donald Trump is all about the cameras.
John Chambers: Do you ever think that this is all just for the cameras? Lester Siegel: Well, they’re getting the ratings, I’ll tell you that.
(There is an “Argo” quote for every occasion.)
My heart is also with the people who got hurt, including Trump. I am not a monster. Questioning a convicted felon does not take away my empathy for the fact that I could be wrong and he still got hurt, as well as people around him. I heard that someone died, but it was unclear to me whether on Facebook this person was talking about an innocent bystander or whether they were talking about the shooter being shot by Secret Service. I will do the deep dive later, but I presented my confusion and concern over this issue to present another one. Copilot is designed not to talk about politics. In situations like this, it leads OBJECTIVELY to problems.
I did not ask my question with bias at all. I asked for news..
Ada is the same way. Her data set only goes up to 2021, so I asked her if she knew who Donald Trump was. I told her that it was 2024 now, so if I told her what happened in my timeline, could she act as a sounding board? She said yes, but then when she said it was a hypothetical situation, I told her that what I needed her to understand is that this wasn’t hypothetical. Someone actually did try to shoot the former president.
She then told me that she was not designed to talk about politics and shut down.
We are shutting down every avenue capable of making us understand a truly frightening political arena. We don’t discuss it intelligently amongst ourselves, and it pisses me off that I can’t discuss it with someone who literally can’t be uneducated or unintelligent.
In terms of politics, we’re taking away all the smart and wondering why we’re fucked.
Stories That Are All True 