Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1521
Finishing Tolkien's legendarium, fever dreams of Project 2028, Court reform, a rare roundup of links and articles, a guy in a Ram Dass basketball jersey and the mystery of number 108.
Morning, good morning. I am so tired. I cannot get over this jetlag. Responsibly tried to go to sleep at 10:30 last night, at 2AM I was still tossing and turning, hoping to fall asleep. Up at 8, so, six hours, not the end of the world, but, gah. It’s summer, man. I want my long sleeps.
I did have three great ideas for a new democratic president, though, as I spent like two hours fantasizing about all the things the next Democratic president could do with all these stupid new powers the Supreme Court gave them. Really satisfying stuff:
Invoke the Defense Production Act and buy up every single GPU Nvidia makes for a year and use it to make a public cloud
Take the entire ICE budget and give it to the detainees as part of the dismantling of ICE and the settling of any potential lawsuits. Tear down the actual detention centers one-by-one. Fire all of ICE enforcement. Give customs & immigration to state, give border protection to the DOJ. Personally apologize to every detainee as you let them go. Pardon every single detainee ICE held that did not have a felony conviction before 2024. The rest can get on that path.
But this one’s the best: March Alito, Thomas and Gorsuch into the Oval, have resignation letters prepared for them and 3 or 4 masked goons standing by and inform them they could either sign the resignation letters or you are going to use the powers they gave you to deport them. I am very fond of this one. Then you go on the air afterwards, tell the country what you did, and say you should absolutely not have these powers and both congress and the courts should definitively take them away from you forever. Ideally with a constitutional amendment. Real win-win here.
I spent like an hour thinking of a new Supreme Court composition, which of course would need congress to pass it, which would be hard, but here’s what I came up with:
23 Justices, with fixed terms of 23 years.
One justice appointed every year
If the same party holds the presidency for 3 terms, they will eventually get a majority
Terms are seats, they’re like congress. If a justice dies or resigns, the rest of their term is filled by a new judge. That judge doesn’t get a new 23-year term, they just fill out the rest of the old term.
Judges can serve multiple terms but no judge can start a term after the age of 70.
I am probably forgetting something but, blissfully, I finally fell asleep.
(This is, of course, heavily borrowing from Elie Mystal’s fantastic book Allow Me to Retort, which should be taught in public schools).
I know all this shit feels like a fever dream but the Republicans are living out a fever dream every fucking day an it seems to be mostly working for them so screw voting for a Democrat that can’t reciprocate.
Join the GMHHAY slack! Reply to this email and ask for an invite if you’re a human who likes chatting with other humans about topics such as these within!
We are listening to The Cure remix album today, Mixes of a Lost World. It is a second listen. I can’t remember if I mentioned it the first time. It is… well, it is too long. Way too long. But there are 5 or 6 good mixes on it. I like the Mogwai one and thew 65daysofstatic one and the Orbital one and the Four Tet one. Two by artists I don’t know: Meera (NO) and Cosmodelica? But a lot of the are a bit too samey. It must be hard to make a remix for a remix album. You want to come off as unique but, I suspect, you don’t get to hear any of the other remixes?
Big news I finished the Tolkien legendarium last night. All… um… gonna say nineteen books. Started with the Hobbit, a re-read, and after that is when I decided to just go for it. Read The Silmarillion, then Lost Tales, then all 12 volumes of The History of Middle Earth then all 3 volumes of The Lord of the Rings. Eighteen I guess. I started in November. I guess I averaged two-point-something books a month. Not great but not the worst.
I am mostly happy to be done and ready to read something else. But also I enjoyed it very much. I like the way Tolkien endows the word “errand” with nobility. Frodo was on an “errand.” Beren was on an “errand” to go pick up a Silmaril for his honey.
It is absolutely stunning how often Tolkien uses the word “suddenly” and no one stopped him. He uses it like, I swear to god, a hundred times a book. At one point in The Two Towers a group of people are slowly and carefully transversing the land creeping up upon their enemy. And then “suddenly” the land changed under them. No, dude, it changed gradually. At one point I swear to god he is using the word every other page. And no one minds! No one says anything! So many suddenlies! Swear to god he might as well start the whole thing with “Once upon a time.”
I have dreams of spin-offs. I would like a TV series that is a sort of Farscape or DS9-style “outpost” show that takes place in Cirdan’s realm starting at the end of the first age when literally everyone is hanging out there. I would like an entire series based on the Witch King of Angmar, who is really quite the mystery who is that guy anyway. Oh and totally want a spin-off of Aragorn’s time in Gondor as Captain Thorondor, vying with a young Denethor for the trust of Denethor’s father, the Steward before him. And Aragorn’s time east of the Sea of Ruhn what the hell is going on out there.
I will miss all these people. But that’s okay because I have the standalone Children of Hurin, The Fall of Gondolin, etc to read if I ever feel like it. I mean I basically technically read them since they’re all subsets of The History of Middle Earth but they will make nice Cliff’s Notes.
Really I miss the weird shit in Lost Tales the most. I miss Telvido the Prince of Cats he was a great character I am sad they turned him into a wolf. I miss that weird dwarf that Turin took hostage who also became his sort-of friend and had that weird proto-Lembas bread that the Elves were really jealous of. Quality Lembas Bread intelligence/counterintelligence drama there would have liked to see more about that: a bread cold war between Elves and Dwarves.
Farewell, Middle Earth. I hardly knew ye.
I also have for you today with my ultra-rare link roundup entry. As you may recall, I send all the interesting-looking long articles I like to read to my Kindle Scribe using an Automator script, and then I read them all on long flights. So, back from Alaska, I had a good 10 hours or so of non-sleeping flight time to do some reading. Normally, I strongly dislike newsletters that are just a bunch of links, readers don’t like that shit. No one wants to read a thing, think they’re getting something done, and then suddenly have ten more things to do. Maddening. But I make an exception once per long trip. Also, the weekend is coming. Thus:
Here are the most noteworthy articles:
A review of a book that posits that the spate of serial killers in the Northwest in the 70’s was related to toxic chemicals and specifically lead. I was very into this idea at the beginning and was about to buy the book, but the (very good) review slowly cast doubt into my mind. You be the judge.
A short piece about Jeremy Renner and the absolutely revelatory phenomenon of Near Death Experiences.
Moving piece about the brother of the Unabomber, who turned him in, and his decades-long, one-sided correspondence with his brother who never forgave him, that little shit.
Great article about the UK Biobank, which I mentioned yesterday, but deserves a plug in this list.
Two pieces from everyone’s favorite grocery newsletter, The Checkout. I read about ten full issues of this on the plane. It really is just the greatest newsletter ever.
An amazing breakdown of RFKJ’s “MAHA Manifesto” and the utter hypocrisy and cronyism baked within. It’s also an indictment of the left who let RFK take the good issues therein and mix them up with his toxic brand of misanthropy. Breaks down the good and the bad, shows us what a proper liberal MAHA Manifesto would look like. Really very solid thinking.
Another of his Gonzo journalism deep dives into one of America’s major grocery chains, this time Walmart. You know how much I love Walmart, though he got me thinking it was pretty awful again. Walmart is terrible if you think of it as a grocery behemoth killing small grocery stores, which he does. Walmart isn’t so bad if you think of it as the only counterweight out there to Amazon’s dominance, as I do. Tomayto Tomahto. Still. Great piece.
Depressingly, of course, a bunch of AI shit:
Great piece about a great AI art project: what happens when you feed an AI nothing.
Two good pieces about AI and water usage: a short one from Bloomberg and a great in-depth series from MIT. The verdict? Too much water is getting used, but we’ll never know exactly how much because all these companies are secretive and don’t tell us anything as they ruin the planet.
A good piece about why superintelligent AI is (maybe) not coming too soon. I refrain from making such predictions one way or the other, because I hate the AI we have now plenty, but I did enjoy this piece’s breakdown of the components of human thinking beyond just intelligence, to include agency and creativity. This came from the GMHHAY Slack, Chad or Florian. Thank you.
A truly great piece in The New Yorker exploring the two very different potential paths and outcomes for AI that serves as a pretty good summation of the current thinking on the topic and explores how experts can come to two such radically different conclusions.
Absolutely devastating piece in the Times about how utterly insane ChatGPT is making people, including the supremely depressing phenomonon of dozens of people writing in to the Times with batshit conspiracy theories, that ChatGPT has told them to write into the Times about. Depressing and horrifying.
Very solid piece from an old acquaintance of mine, Mandy Brown, exploring the ethics and risks of AI that muchly (though not completely) aligns with my thinking: Toolmen.
Finally, I give you the single greatest thing I read: Toward a Theory of Kevin Roose, which included this utterly fantastic paragraph, brought to my attention my my friend Rex. I am not one for long quotes from other people, but it is just so, so good:
My suspicion, my awful awful newfound theory, is that there are people with a sincere and even kind of innocent belief that we are all just picking winners, in everything: that ideology, advocacy, analysis, criticism, affinity, even taste and style and association are essentially predictions. That what a person tries to do, the essential task of a person, is to identify who and what is going to come out on top, and align with it. The rest—what you say, what you do—is just enacting your pick and working in service to it.
Read the whole thing. Worth your time.
Yesterday we took Jane to the playground, the one with the splash pad. It was 93 degrees at 6PM. I may have gotten burned. Emma said you can’t get burned with the sun that low in the sky is that true? There was a guy there who looked like Mike Posner and who was wearing a Ram Dass basketball jersey. It was number 108. I do not know the significance of that number in relation to Ram Dass and Google did not help.
He had a man bun. He was probably 28. But… I still kinda wanted to be friends with him.
Oh look! We’re back in business of playlists. Justa mix today. Oh and I took pictures of Justa Store for you again. Popped in once on the way to the Reunion Dance, bought two Coors Banquet Beers and an ice cream bar. There was a giant lesbian wearing a Dolly Parton shirt working and she was so happy it was just great that place rules.
Carey is from Fairbanks, as I mentioned yesterday. I sucked it up and bought the giant new Springsteen box should be here any day now. Very exciting. Still listening to the new Pulp, the new Doobie Brothers. Got on a Comet kick recently, band I saw some 30 years ago at TTs. Did a deep dive, learned that some of them are in Secret Machines now, tried to get into them, didn’t fail completely. Very into this Um, Jennifer? band. The Pioneer Pickers, with my aunt in it, played “Sea of Heartbreak” when we went to see them in Fairbanks, and I forgot how much I loved the Cash version of that song, so here it is.
I leave you with some Justa Store porn. Until Monday.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.