Good morning good morning. Hello. How are you? Vibe is weird out there. Offline, amongst the unplugged, that is. Way more traffic today than yesterday. Everyone in the school drop-off line has randomly set their clocks a minute faster and are all letting their kids out of the car a minute earlier than we’re supposed to and I couldn’t figure out why but then I realized it’s probably because they’re all on iOS and I am on Android now and we’re using different time servers and damn is this world weird. Everyone is driving slightly more aggro-ly (should be a word) for 7:30 in the morning. They have not refilled the Caffeine Free Zevia slot at the Harris Teeter. It is on sale this week and I am stocking up. The nice old man who works there, with whom I bond about Zevia, told me what day they would restock, though, so that is nice.

Some housekeeping:

I conflated Guy Fawkes and Ned Ludd yesterday. Guy hated the Protestants. Ned hated the factories. It was still a pretty good sentence, though. And honestly. No one knows Ned Ludd’s first name, they just know the word “Luddite.” The joke wouldn’t have been as good, and woulda had a vaguely antireligous had I correctly used the Fawkes analogy. I coulda doubled down, though, made the whole thing even more absurdist. Or, you know, edited. I hear some writers do that. Anyway, thank you to reader Mark for pointing this out.

Reader Amy sent a very good write-up of the Venezuelan oil situation, pointing out that there are plenty of refineries on the gulf coast ready and able to take crappy Venezuelan crude. Like a decent piece of reporting, that article even links to a source on this, which goes even more wonkily into it.

Well. Want the good news or bad news first? Wow, even as I was writing that sentence, I was thinking I’d go with good news first. But you know what? We’ll save it to the end in a half-hearted attempt to find reason for optimism (as opposed to hope, which I will not let be extinguished even when I really want to). But first, our normal break:

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We are listening to a band called Water From Your Eyes this morning. It is not noise metal. My god I listened to so much noise metal yesterday. Around the new year, albums go into my queue in batches. I’ll add the entire “best of 2025” list from some critic, because they had the Agriculture album on there, and suddenly I’m listening to ten metal albums. Don’t get me wrong, it was great. But I am ready for something new. This is a kinda… kinda like a twee, guitar-ish Kunzite or Ratatat or something? I dunno. hard to explain. A little synthy, a little guitar, a little cute, a little experimental. I am into them a whole lot.

Was gonna do my 2026 Bingo card today, a new yearly habit of mine but I am into it. But even though it is not entirely unrelated, I’m gonna put it off another day, because, well. All this.

It saddens me to say but I suspect the No Kings approach isn’t gonna do it. I mean, I think it could pull it off if it were every week, and focused on DC. That could work. And I think that in the Red states we should be doing something every week — remind those fuckers they’re not alone in their hidey holes.

But if we were getting to the point where 3% of the population was showing up in DC every Saturday to protest, well, then, we have escalated to a different tactic. We’re in Lech Wałęsa Solidarity land, and what we’re really talking about is the only thing, at this point, that might actually work short of violence: a general strike.

So, then: What does a general strike look like? And is there really any other option at this point? This is what I have been thinking about, as I fall asleep, for the last few nights. And… it’s complicated!

It has to be said that the Republican party has, over the last 50 years (this is not a new movement!) attempted, not without some success, to methodically dismantle all of the resources available to a general stike movement. People on the socials have been bringing up a General Strike (we’re gonna capitalize it, for now, this may change as I think this all through) for a while now. And when they do, the first thing the defeatest-leftists (a minority! and bots!) point out is that our health care is attached to our jobs now, so we can’t all strike. This is true for many people, of course, but not everyone. And some people, a blessed few, still have job protections where they can’t be immediately fired.

Yet I suspect, in the end, we’re gonna have to do it anyway.

But this is not the only way they have bound our hands. The idea of a general strike being borne of a labor union in the modern US is… optimistic. Maybe not complete fantasty (Hamilton Nolan shoutout) but hard to imagine. Is there even a pan-union, antifascist committee yet? Are they even thinking about it? If one big-or-small union does a strike would others follow? No clue. Because I, like most Americans, don’t belong to a union. I would love to see the unions kick this shit off, but I don’t think we can hold our breath for it. Because Republicans have worked for 50 years to kill Unions.

(God. What have I become. I have become so distanced from Unions that i don’t even know if you’re supposed to capitalize the U in “the Unions.”)

Our nest eggs are fucked, we’re not exactly a country of savers (though it is, weirdly, a lot better than it was when I was a kid. Interest rates I suspect. But I digress). So, you know. Not exactly in the best position, this nation of debt, to take extended unsanctioned work absences.

We’re isolated and confused and everyone is looking for something to do and someone to follow and our leaders are mostly useless and even the ones who aren’t haven’t a clue how to instigate a general strike in a modern United States. Even if they’re there yet. And honestly i don’t think even AOC or Bernie are at General Strike level. But maybe they are and they’re stuck in the same logistical loops as I am. To whit:

Falling asleep, thinking about all this, thinking about the absolute lack of motion on the effort, and my own embarrassed helplessness, I find myself thinking “fuck it I’ll just start doing a strike.” Because I, like all of you, am fucking sick of this shit and wish I could do more and keep looking for someone to fucking tell me what to do to put an end to this, and no one fucking is.

Last night in bed I was remembering a gala event I once attended. As I entered the temple of capitalism in downtown Manhattan, they handed me a little white enamel pin that said STOLSTREJK FOR KLIMATET on it in big handwritten caps. “Thanks for the pin,” sexy host lady who was also handing out champagne, “but i have no idea what this is.”

“We’ll explain it,” she reassured me. And then this gala helpfully showed a very well-produced video of Greta Thunberg in the early days, sitting all alone outside Swedish Parliament. It told the story of the movement that grew from it. And I was sold, and I have been a fan of hers ever since.

So. “Fuck it” I thought, laying in my bed, helpless. I’ll do that. “One man general strike here we come.” What is it they say like a mantra in late-period Disney-corporate Star Wars? We are the spark that lights the flame that starts the fire. Shit yeah. Nemick lives.

Then, a million comical real-world obstacles cropped up in my mind. Just a hilarious depressing litany of obstacles, valid and craven.

First, the absurdist: I am an AdTech CEO, white man, suburban, rich. It is absolutely hilarious to imagine me pull a Greta. Would those characteristics make it better or worse, more effective or less. Both, probably.

Geographical: Where would I do this? Greta did it in front of Parlimant. This is another thing I don’t think we can do anymore, that Republicans have cut off. I remember as a kid visiting the White House (weird how both my Alaskan uncles ended up in DC) and it had this great carnival atmosphere of people holding signs and protesting and whackos and tourists and vendors and it was just great. So much fun. America.

But I’m pretty sure that in Trump’s America if you sat in front of the White House every day with a sign saying “FIGHT FASCISM GENERAL STRIKE NOW” they would haul you off? Right? I don’t even know, actually, for sure. Anyone been in front of the White House lately? And of course getting hauled off isn’t so bad if you’re on the street the next day like the good old days but now you might just get one, maybe two days before they black-site you. I mean, they would, right?

And, of course, I don’t live in DC. What am I gonna do? Move there? Hey Jes do you still have that condo? Is it empty? Can I borrow it? It might get confiscated in a bogus, Supreme-Court-sanctioned civil asset forfeiture move, but that’s cool, right?

Maybe I can do it in Raleigh at the state house. My internet-parasocial-friend Jeff Jackson the AG can come out and be like “hey Rick what are you doing, man. You know Josh isn’t really the problem here.” And he is so right and the news would ignore it and it would get nothing done because there is no symbolism in doing this in front of local government buildings.

But we have the internet maybe we could do it somewhere else? I mean, maybe. Internet marketing goes a long way, and Trump and his gang are internet addled, but it would have to be somewhere that was newsworthy enough, that was memeable, that was stable enough that you could do it forever. Was thinking maybe Mar-A-Largo but they’d nab you. Anything in NYC is kinda pointless. Something hilarous like his birth home maybe? It’s possible. Do you tie it to a single topic, like at the aforementioned gulf refineries? Seems incorrect. Needs to be something sort of limial. Symbolic but not too concrete. Trump Tower Chicago maybe.

But DC is best probably. The Bonus Army move is probably still available to us, right? 43,000 soldiers and their families camped out in DC until Hoover cracked and had them forcibly removed and then lost the election in a landslide. And don’t tell me Bloomberg’s asshole move to disburse Occupy Wall Street didn’t contribute to his failure in the presidential election. I know, at least, I personally, never gave him the time of day after that (my friend Peter groaning now thinking “I told you so, Rick”).

But we also have Trump calling out the army on protesters in DC in term one, remember that, remember the bible bullshit and the outrage no you don’t remember it, I barely remember it, so many outrages, god, lemme look it up. Ahh right. 2020. Protesters tear-gassed and disbursed so Trump could do a photo op with a bible at a church. Ah, those halcyon days when Trump still pretended to be christian. It’s funny how he attracts these groups — Christians, MAHA idiots, anti-war donut-leftists, and then sells them out and they… just stick with him. Really is a super power.

But I digress. Dude would murder an entire protest before it got one-tenth the size of the Bonus Army these days, zero doubt. Stephen Miller falls asleep dreaming of that day.

And then there is our own lives! Our jobs! Like… I need my job? I bet you need your job? I have some savings, sure. Is this the moment to use it? Yes, it is. But I have PLANS, man. I have a life and kids and goals and retirement to think of and projects and hopes and dreams and everything that makes up a life and waaaah

…and what the fuck Rick man do you think at any time in the history of fascism’s rise that people didn’t have hopes and dreams and lives and kids and goals? YOU KNOW academically all of that will go away one way or the other if this continues. And YOU KNOW that someone needs to stop him.

And, of course, to not fucking die.

And this kind of thinking is exactly how you get fascism. A hundred million people, two hundred million people, making their own peace with all of this so as to not disrupt their life plans.

Then you start thinking (notice how I switched to the second person to deflect from my own personal cowardice) about the actual logistics at your own job and how fucking crazy you would sound to your coworkers to say “hey man I’m gonna go do a one-man general strike against fascism.” Or maybe you convince yourself that all of your coworkers are into it too. And you could as a whole company join in a general strike. And then you kinda giggle about how little it would fucking matter in the world if Applovin’s and Google’s little gnat of a competitor went on strike and all their publishers just shrugged and went over to the monopolists.

And you know no one at Google or Facebook’s gonna start a general strike, though imagine how great it would be if they both went down. But those people are just there to get a couple years on their resume and go work somewhere else or turn into highly respected pundit, a general strike is not in their plans.

(Fun digression, I wonder: can a single, vital, well-intentioned employee still take down Google or Facebook? I know from inside info you could at AWS, and of course you could at Twitter because they’re idiots. But I suspect it would take more than one person at Google or FB these days. I bet you could at Apple.)

Anyway, if I were writing a Ministry-for-the-future-like fantasy novel about the end of Stephen Miller’s reign, this is how it would go: the largest non-auto, non-cop unions (auto because they’re fucked already, they can join when things start kicking off, cops because cops) form a secret alliance with a cabal of 100-200, the last 100-200 remaining labor activists in big tech, and launch the strike out of the blue on a single day in a coordinated action. The NEA, the Service Employees International, the American Federation of State, Country, and Municipal Employees, the Teamsters (if we’re lucky. okay maybe not), the United Food and Commercial Workers, USW, IBEW, LIUNA, the longshoremen and every fed with a conscience all go on strike on day one. Even if you get 20, 30 percent participation, that should do it. In tandem, those 100-200 Silicon Valley holdouts take down the big platforms, swap em out with a message. The site outages only need to last a day. Day two every freak like myself joins in. We smoke em out.

(In a perfect world, 20 or so titans of capitalism at the controls of the markets would join in but lol. We are obviously not in a perfect world. But maybe we could get a couple billionaires to move some money that day or something so they could brag they helped.)

But of course this fantasy is really just me just putting the onus on someone else.

But I do think that could work.

And honestly: what is the point, what is the future of the unions if they don’t do this.

(Just like Chuck Schumer amirite? buh duh bump.)

This is not to say I’m not gonna keep falling asleep every night trying to think of a way to Greta it. There’s something there, still, despite all of the right’s interference. Maybe I’m not the man for the job, but I sure am happy to help that person.

I suspect a lot of us, maybe because of the muscle memory from term one, are hoping we can get through this without profound personal sacrifice. We are the 52% or so of the country with empathy and care for others, and this motivates our desire to see this end. But we are not yet ready for deep personal sacrifice.

And that may well be our failing.

We are probably going to need to reconsider this. All of us.

Or, I dunno. Maybe the general strike thing (notice how it’s lower case now, for a reason) is just another fantasy. Maybe it’s another way we can all be lazy. Because on most days of an extended general strike, the days we’re not pointlessly protesting in the bluest town in the south, you know what I’d be doing? Puttering and sleeping.

And my god I sure would like to putter and sleep my way to salvation.

(Ironically if more people took up puttering and sleeping over getting red-pilled on the internet, we’d be there. Someone shoulda taught Stephen Miller carpentry.)

Oh I promised some good news:

Congress is poised to override two of Trump’s vetoes. They’re milquetoast bills, petty vetoes even at the current heights of Trump’s derangement. But it is still a step.

Trump is back on his populist executive order schtick, sending out missives about private equity buying homes and defense industry CEOs being paid too much. They’re bullshit, he’d never do anything about either one of them, of course. But it also indicates the dude is worried about the mid-terms, and he is pivoting back to trying to appear reasonable. Idiots will fall for it like they fell for no wars and RFK won’t ban vaccines and something-better-than-Obamacare, sure. But he is obviously worried about the mid-terms and that means something.

(the Mid-terms are another complexifier on a general strike when you get down to brass tacks. Do it before the midterms? Maybe alienate people? But maybe stop things more quickly? Or after, after we’ve won the house and can maybe do something and the steam is released a little? No good options. But things move fast. Tactically, after is maybe best. Realistically, we might not last that long).

And there are multiple votes coming up, with the support of one or two Republicans, limiting his military options. He’d break the law and ignore them, of course, and they may not pass, but… they might?

And he said the US military budget should go up 50% to $1.5 trillion, which is of course insane and politically dumb but also the entire Republican congress just ignored him. That’s new. Ish.

Grasping at straws here, sure. But they’re not nothing. They are weakening. They are getting more scared. Are they weak and scared yet? Maybe not.

But that’s the direction they’re going.

Jane and I had a long talk in the car this morning about negotiation and parenting and her zero sum negotiating tactics and how I respect them but also they aren’t going to always work and I didn’t tell her what to do or ask her questions I tried a new thing where I said “my theory is you’re thinking this do you think that sounds true?” And all she had to do is say yes or no, which was nice. Maybe I made some progress. It was a hard day. I think she’s so manically excited to be not sick and back at school and gymnastics and she’s overstimulated and thrilled and it is making her a bit more aggro. It’s a lot. We’re tired.

But she let me brush her hair in the car for the first time in months, so, you know. Not all bad.

So I guess we’re back to doing screenshots of playlists, since the embed in Buttondown from Apple Music isn’t that good and you can’t see tracks. And I am told that Apple Music has no way to make a playlist playable to someone without an account, which sucks and I had not considered that. I will be doing more work on this, maybe I can find a way to automate Songshift. But it’ll be a while. Bear with me.

We have a W Hotel Lobby in a Better Alternate Universe playlist today, symbolic of the hope for a better world, har har. Volume 100. Real milestone. Can’t remember half of this because it’s from before the holiday, but I do know I have my friend Jenna’s year-end list to thank for about a third of these tracks, so thank you Jenna.

All right. Hopefully we can have a normal day. But, you know, nearly two hours have gone by since I started writing this, so we probably invaded Greenland or some shit.

Bye.