Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1538
It is my mom's birthday. I watched all three hours of the Hunter Biden interview. Day four of quarantine.
Good morning good morning. Here we are. Day four of my quarantine. No fever, no real symptoms, that red line of positive on the BinaxNow still showing up within seconds. I must have big viral loadz. Did you know BinaxNows come in 4-packs now? Much more convenient. Lots of people writing in to tell me how they have COVID too, how there is a big summer wave — conveniently named the same thing as my company! Did you know there is a big summer COVID wave? Well, now you do. GMHHAY is also the CDC these days someone’s gotta do it.
So let’s see. Where we at today. Oh yes thank you everyone for your kind words on my ruminations this week on the world’s political horror shows. I would say we’re moving on, but… lol maybe tomorrow.
I will also say that I did have one hopeful thought while reading El Akkad’s book:
The term “late stage capitalism” is inherently optimistic. Never noticed that before.
It is, or would be, my mother’s birthday today. Would have been her 79th. Miss you, Mommy. While I was in Alaska the summer, my friends told me all sorts of hilarious stories about you. One friend told me how you called him into your office and sat there with his parents and said something like “Let’s cut to the chase. You’re not serious about school. You have no intention of ever being serious about school. You need to just drop out.” And my friend was like “wow yeah you know what? You guys are right.” I had never known this story, even when that guy was one of my best friends, presumably not long after this happened. A more bad-ass side to my mother than I was aware of.
My memories of my mother are definitely shifting away from the late years. Interestingly, they seem to mostly be shifting to my early childhood. Four, five, six years old. When she was basically my whole world. Mommymommymommy I miss you mommy.
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We are continuing on our journey through the “To Investigate” queue today. Through Herculean efforts, we shaved ten hours off of the queue again yesterday, for the third day in a row, bringing the total queue length down to just under 40 hours. I know I said this yesterday but I’m not sure I can shave off another ten hours of it today. It is a shockingly manual, laborious process. I get to a new album in the queue, check the 2025 starred tracks playlist for any songs from this album that I have already starred, and remove the 0-3 songs that have already been starred from the “To Investigate” re-listen, because I figure those songs are already now permanently in my life and I want to give the rest of the album one last shot. This is how I manage to get through 10 hours of queue in an 8-hour workday.
Right now I am listening to the new Swans album, Birthing, their last, apparently (“at least in this form.”) There is a final Swans tour this fall. I have tickets for the Boston show. Will I go? I am, at this moment, still planning on it, but I am “planning” on traveling for three different rock shows this fall and I know in my heart of hearts I can’t make them all. There are some tough choices ahead.
Okay look. I have some news for you. I know this is crazy. But I did it.
I went and watched all three hours of Hunter Biden’s interview.
I had seen the clip where he swears a blue streak and talks about what he would do with El Salvador if he were president and, for better or worse, it aligned with exactly what I would do were I president. And I had seen his clip talking about how James Carville and Axelrod and the Pod Save America guys (oh man he hates the Pod Save America guys) are all useless and that gave me a good chuckle. And I had seen the pearl-clutching op-eds from the Times and MSNBC about how the Hunter Biden needs to shut up and I was like “so far so good from that guy.” Kinda hilarious that the first dem to explicitly agree with my proposed El Salvador foreign policy was Hunter freakin Biden.
Then I saw the unedited interview was three hours and, well, as you may have heard, I am in quarantine, so it was that or the episode of Game of Thrones where they cut off Ned Stark’s head.
So I watched it.
You know what? Pretty great.
I mean, first and foremost: I, like you, know that a) all of the Republican shit about Hunter Biden was cruel and dishonest, and b) the dude has been a crack addict with a gun. These are both true.
But watching this interview made me realize how, against my will, even while not believing them, how thoroughly MAGA had dominated the media landscape about Hunter. I did not know he went to Georgetown and Yale. I did not know he had been a professor at Georgetown, a board member of Amtrak (under Bush), served in the Commerce Department under the Clinton Administration. I did not know he had been Chairman of the board of the US branch of the World Food Program. I did not know he had been an executive at a large bank.
I basically did not know that the dude had done anything of merit at all as his own person. And sure, yeah, nepo babies and growing up in the family he grew up in and all that. But no more so than usual, in this dumb country, and with a decent record of keeping his distance from his father’s political activities. He was a lobbyist when his father became Veep. he quit lobbying and instead went into business with his uncle.
So. I will say. The dude is incredibly well-spoken, incredibly well-educated. He knew the details in and out of the evidence in the Leonard Peltier case, said it was one of two things he ever lobbied his father about. He quoted Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hannah Arendt. He didn’t say a single “fuck” for the first 30 minutes of the interview, probably better than I would have done.
When he spoke about his father, I teared up. Those two have been through so much: they watched Hunter’s mother and sister die in a car wreck. They watched his brother die. When the interviewer asked how he was, he talked for a bit and he said he seems fine I just wish… and he teared up and he said “he never complains, you know? Sometimes I wish he would complain more.”
That got me.
He also let loose on George Clooney’s stabbing of Biden in the back and in the process spilled a little tea I didn’t know about. Apparently Clooney’s wife Amal, had some sort of draft law around Gaza that Joe wouldn’t sign. Hunter said that he was there, and there were plenty of witnesses, and George only claims that Joe couldn’t remember his name because his protocol attaché did what he always does and told Joe the names of the people walking up. But really… George was really pissed because Joe wouldn’t sign Amal’s law or petition or whatever.
Hunter was vague about what the document actually was. He trailed off, not wanting to get into it. It was almost as if he knew that his dad’s position on Gaza were not the correct one. At first I thought he was going to avoid the topic entirely, like all good Democrats do these days, but no. Gaza was the last topic the interview touched on, and he minced no words about it. Bibi is the biggest threat to Judaism and a butcher. His wife and kid are jewish and he resents what Bibi has done for antisemitism around the world, and explicitly condemned the killing.
He had just come out of a stint of vociferously, tenaciously defending his father’s presidency, and did not come out and say it, but it was pretty clear this was the one topic he did not agree with his father’s administration about.
Now, if you ask me, Joe Biden not signing a petition condemning or illegalizing genocide is a much better reason to shitcan a presidential candidate than he forgot someone’s name. But of course Clooney wouldn’t have gotten the results he did if he took that approach. So he called him senile and sealed his fate.
My personal opinions on this topic sort of sidestep this whole episode: I think Biden should have never announced a second run. I think both Biden and Kamala should have been 100x more forceful in their actions against genocide. We never should have gotten ourselves into the position we were in in that race, and that is Joe’s fault. And Joe will have to live, forever, with his failures in Gaza.
But still. Damn Clooney. Merciless.
Yesterday, nearly five years after the project, a patron finally filled out the form for my Kickstarter project around The Economics of Star Trek. Five years. I had to email Kickstarter to get them to let me see the dude’s address, because all of my backer tools had been shut down. Apparently they shut down your tools after a while I don’t know what’s up with that. Honestly everything was completely different up there from when I fulfilled the project five years ago and I don’t think their systems ever contemplated one of those old projects somehow needing to use the new tools. But after a support request and a shockingly short wait, we got there.
I thought a lot about adding some sort of funny note to the project, like “took your time, huh?” But I didn’t bother. I just mailed him his book like the Kickstarter had ended last week. I played it straight.
Last night, Jane brought me my dinner at the back outside door of my office and stood there with her happy hands jumping up and down telling me how much she missed me and blowing kisses from ten feet away and it was the cutest goddamn thing.
I miss my daughter. I want to leave this hovel hole.
Justa mix for you today. New stuff. So much new stuff. I want to take a nice break from listening to new music and, like, listen to Xymox or something, but we persevere. We have set this task before us and we will see it to completion, noble heroes that we are.
Okay have a spiffing day. George Emerson is spiffing.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.